Apocalypse Trump

November 28, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: Apocalypse Trump, Media, New York Times, propaganda, Washington Post
Posted in: Biden, Democracy, Trump

One of the fads in the liberal media is for Trump horror stories, Apocalypse Trump, should he be re-elected as president. Like political porn, there may be no real point to all this other than to titillate, although there could also be an underlying strategy try and con the proles into not voting Trump in 2024. Either way, it’s worth reading the horror tales just to laugh at what the writers’ imagine a second Trump term might be like.

The Los Angeles Times gets you the inside baseball the action with an article headlined “Trump promises vengeance and power grabs if he wins in 2024. Here’s the plan.” Save yourself the trouble of looking; there are no named sources to almost all of these descriptions of Trump 2.0, though they are presented as certainties. The Times begins with Inauguration Day, stating as fact “anticipating widespread protests against his second term, Trump and allies reportedly are drafting plans to invoke the Insurrection Act in his first hours back in the White House — thereby confirming the expected protesters’ likely point: Trump is a danger to liberty and constitutional governance.” The author doesn’t seem to remember how the Insurrection Act, last used in 1992 to quell riots in L.A., did not end liberty and/or the Constitution. But it wasn’t Trump you see, so OK!

And that’s just one of many MAGA plans in the works, as the Washington Post reported, all aimed at making good on what the writer feels is Trump’s central promise of the 2024 campaign: retribution. According to the Post, Trump allies are “mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents,” even naming individuals to be investigated and prosecuted. Ironic prose given Trump  is neck deep into five legal battles, two with the Federal government, since he left office, and that the FBI was used even while he was in office to spy on him in an effort to prove he was a Russian spy.

It is also ironic Trump has all these plans to use the judicial system against his enemies. First of course because declaring himself something of a dictator you’d think Trump could bypass all that innocent until guilty stuff that bogs down trials and just kick in doors. More important, why would Dictator Trump bother with “justice” at all? After all, writes the Los Angeles Times, “His obnoxious outbursts this week in his New York civil trial over financial skulduggery [sic] were just the latest evidence of his disdain for the law and the judicial system. And we haven’t even gotten to his three criminal trials for seeking to overturn Biden’s election and making off with government documents. No one — not witnesses, prosecutors or judges — is immune from his attacks and the death threats that follow.” Jen Psaki separately warned MSNBC viewers if Trump regains office he would “unravel the rule of law as we know it.” Jamelle Bouie of the Times warns “it looks an awful lot like a set of plans meant to give the former president the power and unchecked authority of a strongman.”

Ah, death threats. One cornerstone of Apocalypse Trump is he controls a zombie army of MAGA believers that he can direct against adversaries — “targeting” in the words of one judge. Another reason to question his “planned” use of the court system. Why not just release the hounds? After all, why not make good on his claim under the Constitution’s Article II, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” made when everyone was saying Trump was a Russkie spy. Nonetheless, the system it is. Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. The Washington Post reports Trump told advisers he wants the Justice Department to investigate his former chief of staff, John Kelly, and former attorney general Bill Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb, and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley. Trump also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI/Justice Department.

Here’s how it will work, using justice to commit unjust acts. The Post, to the rescue to the confused, says “To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations.” The Post quotes “It would resemble a banana republic if people came into office and started going after their opponents willy-nilly,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia who studies executive power. “It’s hardly something we should aspire to.”

If irony was water we’d all have drowned by now.

It wouldn’t be a party unless The New York Times weighed in. They succinctly state “Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands. Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies under direct presidential control.” He’ll do this by “stripping employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country.’” The New Republic wrote an article headlined “Inside Trump’s Fascist Plan to Control All Federal Agencies if He Wins.” Tom Nichols wrote in the Atlantic there are “plans for a dictatorship that should appall every American.”

And let’s not forget everyone’s favorite Apocalypse Trump subject, immigration. There, according to the New York Times, Trump is conjuring up “sweeping raids, giant camps and mass deportations,” claiming “If he regains power, Donald Trump wants not only to revive some of the immigration policies criticized as draconian during his presidency, but expand and toughen them.” Trump supposedly plans to ban people from Muslim-majority nations and reimpose a Covid-era policy of refusing asylum claims based on his feeling migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis. He plans to deputize local police officers and the National Guard voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states to carry out sweeping raids. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate funds, Trump would redirect money in the military budget.

Are you not entertained? That may be the only purpose of the Apocalypse Trump genre, garnering clicks. It stands then to reason that to keep the snowball rolling the claims toward the Apocalypse, the tall tales, need to become increasingly dramatic, topping yesterday’s dopamine hit. Do a quick Google search using the phrase “Trump will seize control” to see the latest, as well as some greatest hits. These types of stories were popular during Trump 1.0, putting words into his mouth and distorting those that came out, assigning nefarious intent to even the simplest Executive Order. A favorite fretted over Trump seizing control of the FEMA emergency broadcast system and the whole Internet to disseminate propaganda and control his minions. NBC News helpfully uncovered the fact “Trump can’t use FEMA’s wireless alerts to send personal messages” a question which apparently had not come up previously in the 80-odd-years the original Cold War system has been in place.

A second driver of all this “journalism” is a desperate attempt to convince on-the-fence voters to not vote for Trump. After all, the Los Angeles Times made their intent for this advocacy pretty clear: “Too many voters are disengaged, grumpy that their choice seems to be coming down to Trump vs. Biden. As if those choices were comparably distasteful when, in fact, one is vanilla and the other is nitroglycerin.” The idea here is to use the tools of the media to scare the proles into not voting for Trump for fear of bringing on the end of Constitutional government in the United States. You’d think people would be tired by now with these “sky is falling” pronouncements but apparently you’d be wrong given the sheer bulk of them, and the crazier-than-last-time feel most have.

The possible effectiveness of this strategy assumes most Trump voters, for gosh sakes 50 percent of the entire country, are too dumb to see what is right in front of them, fascism itself. But since Trump has not been kind enough to write out a Mein Kampf-like manifesto of all the dastardliest deeds he intends to do, America’s liberal media is doing it for him. No mind Trump is the only recent president not to start or join a new war; he is a war monger. No mind Trump tried to restart relations with North Korea via old-fashioned diplomacy; we are on the verge of nuclear disaster. No matter the state of the economy or decisions on Covid which resonate well in hindsight, he is clownishly wrong. No mind Trump has participated according to the law in every legal action against him, he does not believe in the rule of law. Oh, and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is so scared about what will happen in Term 2.0 he is planning to leave the country, so there is an upside.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Ukraine War is Just About Over

November 22, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: Crimea, hamas, Israel, Kiev, NATO, propaganda, ukraine, Zelensky
Posted in: Afghanistan, Embassy/State, Iraq, Military

The handwriting was on the wall. An Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled “I’m a Ukrainian, and I Refuse to Compete for Your Attention” summed things up nicely: a media junket the author’s friend had been organizing to Ukraine was canceled. The TV crew instead left for the Middle East.

The United States controls how the war in the Ukraine proceeds and always has. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said it was the American side which scuttled any chance of peace in Ukraine as early as March 2022, soon after the war began. “The only people who could resolve the war over Ukraine are the Americans. During the peace talks in March 2022 in Istanbul, Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They had to coordinate everything they talked about with the Americans first. However, nothing eventually happened. My impression is that nothing could happen because everything was decided in Washington.”

Fast-forward to 2023 and the story is different. Earlier this month NBC News quietly released a report which said U.S. and European officials broached the topic of peace negotiations with Ukraine, including “very broad outlines of what Ukraine might need to give up to reach a deal with Russia.” NBC said “the discussions are an acknowledgment of the dynamics militarily on the ground in Ukraine and politically in the U.S. and Europe.” They began amid concerns the war has reached a stalemate and about the ability to continue providing open-ended aid to Ukraine. Biden administration officials are also worried Ukraine is running out of men in this war of attrition, while Russia has a seemingly endless supply. Ukraine is also struggling with recruiting and recently saw public protests (not shown on American TV) about President Volodymyr Zelensky’s open-ended conscription requirements. Kiev is today sending 40 and 50-year-olds to the front.

This comes as Time reported Zelensky’s top advisers admitted the war is currently unwinnable for Ukraine. Things look a bit better from the point of view of Ukraine commander-in-chief General Valery Zaluzhny, who believes the war is only at a stalemate. “It’s now a battle of inches,” say American sources quietly.

Americans will be forgiven if they never hear this bad news, never mind be surprised by it if they did. The narrative which drove sports teams to wear blue and yellow patches and E Street Band member Steve Van Zandt to paint his guitar the Ukrainian colors was simple. Amid a flood of propaganda, the story was always the same: Ukraine was pushing back the Russians with weapons provided by a broad range of agreeable NATO benefactors. Between Ukrainian jet fighter aces with improbable kill ratios to patriotic female sniper teams with improbable hair and makeup, Russia was losing. It would be a difficult but noble slog for “as long as it takes” to drive the Russians out. Any talk about peace was insulting to Kiev, fighting for its survival and all. Meanwhile mediagenic President Zelensky at first flew around the world like the anti-Christ Bono, procuring weapons while showing off his man-to-man relationships with celebrities. Now desperate, Zelensky is inflight claiming Russia, Iran, and North Korea sponsored Hamas’ attack on Israel, trying to rattle up some support.

It was as compelling as it was untrue. Any thoughtful analysis of the war showed it to be, from early days, a war of attrition at best for the Ukrainian side and while the U.S. could supply nearly bottomless cargo planes full of weapons and munitions, right up to the promised F-16 fighter-bombers and M1A tanks due on line soon, it could not fill the manpower gap. Any appetite for American troop involvement was hushed up early in the fight. Russia could do what she had always done at war, hunker down in the field and reach deep into its vast territory to find ever more conscripts to wait out the enemy. It didn’t hurt that Russia’s capability versus NATO equipment was surprisingly good, or perhaps the Ukrainians’ handling of sophisticated Western arms was surprisingly bad.

But the most predictable factor leading to quiet U.S. moves toward some sort of “solution” in Ukraine is as predictable as the battlefield results. There is unease in the U.S. government over how much less public attention (despite the propaganda) the war in Ukraine has garnered since the Israeli-Hamas conflict began more than a month ago. Combined with what looks like a feisty new Speaker of the House seeking to decouple aid to Israel from aid to Ukraine, officials fear that shift could make securing additional funds for Kiev difficult.

Americans, the people and their government, assisted by their media wielding the greatest propaganda tools ever imagined, seem capable of focusing on only one bright shiny object at a time. Over 41 percent of Americans now say the U.S. is doing too much to help Kiev. That’s a significant change from just three months ago when only 24 percent of Americans said they felt that way. In the case of wars, a new bright shiny object must include two clear sides, one good and one pure evil, with one preferably an underdog, daily combat footage which can be obtained without too much danger, and a football game-like progression across a map that is easy to follow. It should not be boring. Ukraine was such a conflict and enjoyed almost a full two-year run. But the fickle attention of America shifted to the Middle East just as things started to look more and more like static WWI trench warfare in Ukraine. It was a hard act to follow but something always follows nonetheless (the same calculus works for natural disasters and mass shootings, which are only as mediagenic-good as the next one coming.)

Ukraine, like Israel, owes most of its continued existence to American weaponry. However, despite the blue and yellow splattered on social media at present, Ukraine does not have anywhere near the base of support Israel does among the American public and especially within the American Congress. The terms for resolving the war will be dictated to Kiev as much by Washington as they will be by Moscow, as with Crimea a few years ago. The end will be quite sad; Russia will very likely solidify its hold on Donbas and the Crimea, and achieve new territory to the west approaching Kiev, roughly 20 percent of Ukraine. Ukraine will be forced to set aside its goal of joining NATO even as the U.S. takes a new stand on its western border with Poland.

It is all something of a set piece. America’s habit of wandering into a conflict and then losing interest is long (Iraq) enough to count as an addition to history (Afghanistan.) “We have your back” and “we will not abandon you” join “the check’s in the mail” and “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” among  joking faux reassurances. Our proxies seem to end up abandoned and hung out to die. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, never mind Vietnam before that, what was realized at the end could have most likely been achievable at pretty much anytime after the initial hurrahs passed away. It is sad that so many had to die to likely see it happen in 2023.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

A Blank Check Again in the Middle East

November 16, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: AUMF, hamas, Houthi, Israel, SOAA, Special Forces, War Powers Resolution
Posted in: Biden, Democracy, Iraq, Syria, Yemen

Did anyone ask you (or maybe Congress) if it was OK to go to war again in the Middle East? After literal decades of fighting in that troubled part of the world, it looks like the U.S. is without discussion, never mind vigorous debate, already at war in various sub-theatres of someone else’s conflict. See if anything that’s going on seems like war to you.

— The U.S. is flying drones over Gaza. The Pentagon says the unmanned aerial vehicle flights began after Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and are being conducted “in support of hostage recovery efforts.” The drone missions are also providing “advice and assistance” to Israel. A total of seven different aircraft are flying across the region, four of them per day, passing information to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF.) The U.S. is also supplying precision-guided munitions, fighter aircraft, and air defense capabilities, such as interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome counter-drone systems, to the IDF.

— U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) are in Israel. Officials anonymously told the New York Times several dozen special operators are on the ground working with the FBI, the State Department, and other U.S. government hostage recovery specialists. A senior Pentagon official told the “Forever Wars” blog that SOF are preparing for “contingencies,” which may include the active retrieval of hostages from Hamas. The U.S. previously said it has sent military advisers to help Israel. Christopher Maier, an assistant secretary of defense, indicated other soldiers have also been deployed. “We’re actively helping the Israelis to do a number of things,” Maier said.

— Two American veteran-run organizations, the Special Operations Association of America (SOAA) and Save Our Allies, sent roughly two dozen volunteers, all former special operators, into Israel and Egypt to support evacuations. Each volunteer was chosen based on having experience working with Egyptians or Israelis. They arrange for local nationals to provide food and medical supplies to trapped Americans, and they have interfaced with the Egyptian military personnel who ultimately have to approve Americans’ departure. The special operations volunteers also coordinate directly with the IDF to ensure Americans are not targeted. They call their work “sheparding” and forswear a kinetic role. SOAA staff are also in Tel Aviv helping to coordinate evacuations. The volunteers’ actions, particularly working with the Egyptian and Israeli forces, come very close to traditional governmental roles, though the groups deny that.

— Meanwhile, the U.S. has roughly 900 troops in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq at at least eight bases/facilities doing God-knows-what. An additional 300 troops will soon be dispatched to the Middle East. Thousands of Marines wait off shore.

— the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named Site 512, the base is also a radar facility that monitors missile attacks on Israel.

— American service members stationed in the Middle East have endured at least 27 attacks by Iran-backed terror groups. There have been 16 attacks in Iraq and 11 in Syria.

— American fighter jets launched two retaliatory airstrikes against locations in eastern Syria on October 26, which were followed by at least six additional small-scale re- retaliatory attacks in the region. A Pentagon spokesperson said the military would “do what we need to do to protect our troops.”

— The USS Carney, a destroyer in the northern Red Sea, intercepted four land attack cruise missiles and 14 drones launched by pro-Iranian Houthi forces in Yemen. A Pentagon spokesperson said the U.S. is prepared to do whatever is needed “to protect our partners and our interests in this important region.” United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS. The attack marked the first time ballistic missiles were launched at Israel since Saddam Hussein fired his Scuds in 1991. The action by the Carney represented the first shots by the U.S. military in the defense of Israel in this conflict.

The ability of the president to make war is a contentious issue that has evolved over the course of American history. The Framers’ intent was to vest the primary power to declare war only in the hands of Congress. This was seen as a way to prevent the president from unilaterally committing the nation to military conflicts, reflecting concerns about an overly powerful executive. The idea didn’t last very long, only until President Thomas Jefferson used military force against the Barbary Pirates without a formal declaration of war. The first official declaration by Congress was not until The War of 1812. Over time, presidents began to assert more authority in matters of war, often without obtaining formal declarations from Congress. The ability to use military force became more flexible, and presidents argued that they had inherent powers as Commander in Chief. Congress approved its last formal declaration of war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Korean War, followed by the Vietnam War, marked a significant turning point in the balance of war powers between the president and Congress. The conflicts, as well as all the brushfire wars of the Cold War, were waged without a formal declaration. In response to growing concerns about presidential war-making authority, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973. This required the President to consult with Congress and seek authorization within 60 days of introducing U.S. armed forces into hostilities or conflicts. It has been near-completely ignored or treated as a technicality, an afterthought. The 9/11 attacks led to the passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which granted the President broad authority to use military force against those responsible for the attacks. This AUMF was used to justify U.S. military actions in various regions, including Afghanistan and Iraq, and literally the whole rest of the world (apply as needed.)

With all this as background, at what point of involvement in the Israeli conflict will we talk about it? The old “boots on the ground” standard, which was never applied to Syria, Yemen, or Iraq War III anyway? Or, as in Ukraine, will Joe Biden simply lead us into another endless war with nary a word of debate and a blank check from a cowardly Congress and media?

Leaving aside one’s feelings for or against Israeli actions, either way it is clear America is again at some sort of war in the Mideast. The difference between what is happening now and “war” is more about semantics than it is about combat. The old definition, something about boots on the ground, no longer serves any function in a world where combat is carried out by remote control and gestures such as the deployment of small numbers of special forces are enough to fan a political flame into a literal one. It is long past time we talked about making war.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

What the Hell is Trump Doing in Court?

November 8, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: 1A, Chutkan, Engoron, First Amendment, gag order, Jack Smith, MAGA, Michael Cohen
Posted in: Democracy, Trump

It was a busy day in court for Donald Trump.

In Washington on October 25 Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the court to reinstate a temporary gag order, this time with jail as the penalty, after Donald Trump called former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows (and by extension former allies who have cut deals in his election interference case elsewhere in Georgia) a weakling and coward if he agreed to testify in exchange for immunity. Trump had been under a earlier gag order which barred him from disparaging prosecutors, court staff, and potential witnesses in a pattern that the court filing called “targeting.” The fear was that Trump was calling out those he wanted MAGA supporters to go after. Smith urged Judge Chutkan to “modify the defendant’s conditions of release by making compliance with the Order a condition.”

On the same day, in response to his violation of a separate New York court gag order Judge Engoron ordered the former president to testify over an insult Trump threw at the judge’s law clerk. The judge found Trump guilty of violating his gag order and ordered Trump to pay a $10,000 fine on top of an earlier $5000. Trump stormed out of the courtroom, his somewhat bewildered Secret Service in tow. Trump technically remains free only on bail.

Pundits asked if Trump is actually trying to antagonize judges and lose both cases. Or could there be some other reason for Trump’s on-the-face-of-it non-self serving actions?

— Trump may be breaking up under the strain. One hates to even go near the “Trump is insane” 25th Amendment crowd, who think they can judge someone’s mental state long distance but one has to allow for the possibility that the stress of having his very existence and ego challenged (the NY trial after all concerns Trump’s actual net worth and status as a real estate kingpin) by small-time mooks like a judge and his clerk may have gotten to Trump. We’re seeing it play out as he strives to control his temper (hence the storming out of the courtroom.) If this is even in part an explanation for Trump’s counter-productive behavior in court it is a dangerous one, adding too much unpredictability into already tense situations. Perhaps Trump simply can’t stop himself. He’s “spent a lifetime attacking those who don’t accommodate him,” and he’s not able to quit now.

— Trump could easily believe none of this matters, certain he will be elected president in November 2024 and be in a position to pardon himself and any others convicted along the way. In Trump’s mind this is all or nothing and the little details, such as the outcome of a specific trial, matter not.

— It’s all about the appeal, part I. Trump knows he will lose the case in front of Judge Engoron, who has already substantively ruled Trump guilty and is holding the current trial sessions primarily to establish the penalty. By egging the judge on to make statements such as finding a Trump response he did not like a “lie,” ruling “as a trier of fact, I find that the witness is not credible… hollow and untrue” Trump is setting up an appeal claiming the judge is biased against him (otherwise, you generally as a defendant do not do things to encourage the judge to throw the book at you.) It is unclear if this is productive or even needed; there is already plenty to work with in the guise of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, a star prosecution witness who is also a sworn enemy of Trump, a convicted felon, and serial liar singing for his supper. Cohen’s testimony is weak, claiming the former president never directly asked him to over-value Trump Organization assets, but instead implied somehow mind-reading style that he do so.

— It’s all about the appeal, part II. The judges’ gag orders against Trump rub rough against the First Amendment, which will form the basis of appeals independent of the trial content themselves. The ACLU, no friend of Donald Trump, argues the gag order imposed by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington barring Trump from making public statements about special counsel Jack Smith, the defense counsel or members of the court violates the Constitution’s 1A. “No modern-day president did more damage to civil liberties and civil rights than President Trump,” the group wrote in a press release. “But if we allow his free speech rights to be abridged, we know that other unpopular voices — even ones we agree with — will also be silenced.”

Specifically, the ACLU argued Chutkan’s order is too vague, too broad, and not sufficiently justified. Trump made many “patently false” statements which have “caused great harm to countless individuals,” the group wrote. But he nevertheless “retains a First Amendment right to speak, and the rest of us retain a right to hear what he has to say.” Prior restraint on Trump’s speech must be “precisely defined and narrowly tailored,” the ACLU wrote, arguing that Chutkan’s order “fails that test.” For example, the prohibition on making public statements that “target” certain individuals is “unconstitutionally vague.” Trump “cannot possibly know what he is permitted to say, and what he is not.”

— It’s all about the appeal, part III. The substance of an appeal is irrelevant, as long as the appeal can be dragged out past the November 2024 election. It is easy to imagine a “throw it all against the wall and see what sticks” approach to buy time. An appeals court could just as easily applaud the two judges for showing restraint when they might have thrown Trump in jail for contempt. No matter, as long as it all chews up the space until the election.

Trump looks like a man who simply does not care what happens with the current trials, or any of the upcoming others. He is both convinced the system is fully unfair and equally aware that the more trouble he seems to get into the faster his poll numbers rise. Each courtroom defeat, small and procedural or a full-on guilty verdict, simply fans the flames for rally crowds. The cash penalties levied by Judges Engoron and Chutkan for violating gag orders have little meaning.

But Trump actually being jailed for violating a gag order would grant him official martyr status. Within a week of his release Trump will be comparing himself to the jailed Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, freedom fighters all. He could then literally test an earlier boast by shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters, or perhaps with MAGA cheers in the background simply flipping off one of the judges who dare seek to decide his fate.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Morality and Expediency in Israel

November 2, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: checkpoint, Expediency, Israel, Morality, Palestine, Thucydides
Posted in: Iraq, Military

It is not hard to tell right from wrong, morality from expediency, especially at the extremes of human existence in war.

It is impossible to see as right — moral — attackers who intentionally targeted and killed over 1,400 civilians, babies and the elderly, and laborers from Thailand who could not be responsible for the decades of Gazan violence, as if that could be justification anyway. Those same gunmen took hostages to use as human shields and will likely murder many of them, too.

It is moral to condemn barbarism. It cannot be brushed aside by phrases such as “ethics is rarely black and white” when in many cases — the massacres in Israel — black is indeed black and white is white. No one can justify killing babies. Morality is not “that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

It speaks poorly of American education that right and wrong are so muddled, that the expediency of horrendous acts is confused with independence. A coalition of 34 student organizations at Harvard say they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” A club in Brooklyn staged an “Intifada Fundraver” using images of militants to advertise a night of pre-Halloween dancing on the graves of more than 1,400 murder victims. A recent You.gov poll conducted after the Hamas attacks in Israel found only 32 percent of Americans aged 18-29 think Hamas deliberately targeted civilian areas in Israel. In a roundup of atrocities, one outlet found at UPenn students chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in response to the killings. Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Virginia cheered the “events of yesterday” as a “step toward a free Palestine.” Student groups at the California State University in Long Beach advertised a “Day of Resistance” rally with a poster featuring an image of a paraglider, used to kill over 200 ravers. A Columbia professor called the attacks “awesome” while another at Cornell described them as “exhilarating.” Thousands rallied in Times Square and across America claiming to support Palestine even as they stepped aside morally for the massacres to occur.

It may be clearer to define the terms morality and expediency. Here’s a practical example, adapted from my first book.

Soldiers in Iraq who would joke about anything would become quiet on a checkpoint. Within the limits of available electricity, they tried to light up the ‘point as best they could, so drivers could see it. Iraq at night was a dark and dangerous place, and like in inner city America the drivers were not going to slow down, or God forbid, stop, without a very good reason. So, Step One was to brighten up your checkpoint so the drivers had that good reason to admit they saw it. Drivers knew if they then tried to run a checkpoint they’d be shot at, a bad way to make time. After the lights were on as best they could be (you could only run so many watts if all you had was some Chinese portable generator), the next step was to communicate to the often uninformed drivers that they needed to stop. There was no such thing as licensing drivers in Iraq; someone showed you how to drive and then you were a driver. Driving trucks, either as suicide bombers or as delivery persons, was sought-after employment, so fibbing about actually knowing how to drive was popular. It was possible the guy heading toward your checkpoint had not, like you, done this before.

Standing at a checkpoint in a dense area was easier, as the jammed up traffic meant cars approached you at a crawl and everyone had some time to signal their intentions across cultures and languages. However, in the suburbs or on a lesser-traveled road, things got stickier. You could start with big signs in Arabic and English that told folks to slow down, but there was that light problem again, plus many Iraqis were illiterate. You could set up all manner of flashers and twirling things, a good start, but ambiguous. It could be a wedding party (plenty of guns there as well).

Car bombs were a thing to be scared of at a checkpoint. In most cases the explosives were intended for some other target, and just had to pass through your ‘point. But, if the driver thought you were on to him, he’d blow the car right there and never mind the real target. Checkpoints also made everyone nervous, and nervous people and guns were a bad mix. Iraqi drivers hit the gas too often, worried about whatever, maybe angry, maybe stuck in an Arabic macho cycle and needing to show the Army who had guts in a real dumb way.

You hitched up your pants and started thinking about the ROE as cars approached. ROE meant “rules of engagement,” basically a set of orders on when you were allowed to kill someone legally, without consequence. Even wars have rules, and nobody went outside the wire without knowing exactly what the rules were. ROEs changed all the time, but at a checkpoint they might have gone like this: try and stop the car with lights, sounds, and hand gestures. If he kept coming, shine a laser or bright light at the driver (called “beaming”). If that did not work, fire a warning shot, or a non-lethal round. Still coming? Fire into the engine block to disable the car. Not enough? Kill someone. This all seemed logical, but let’s play the game together for real.

You are 23 years old and at a checkpoint, having been up the last 18 hours, and staying awake only with the constant application of Rip It energy drinks, chew and instant coffee crystals crunched between bites of candy. Last night one of your buddies was almost killed by a driver at a checkpoint who got scared and hit the gas. You are sweating despite the cool weather because standing still anywhere, never mind under bright lights, can attract snipers and you do not want to get popped tonight. The vehicle approaching has only one headlight, and it looks like there are several people in the front seat where you’d expect only one or two. In the span of three seconds you need to try and wave down the driver, beam him with the laser if he doesn’t slow down, fire a non-lethal round if he gases and goes and then switch weapons and be ready to take a life. You’re Zeus throwing lightning bolts. Make the decision. Make the decision now, shoot or don’t shoot the guy. You’re the judge of your own cause.

And that’s the difference between what Israel has done in the past through mistakes and as a consequence of war, and what the Palestinians did earlier this month taking 1,400 lives and killing babies by choice. There is no equivalency. It seems new, a sick product of our modern age, but it is all old. The Greek Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War is a seminal work in the field of military history. It offers a deep exploration of the intersection between morality and expediency in the context of a long conflict between Athens and Sparta more than 2.000 years ago. Thucydides presents the moral dilemmas and strategic considerations people face during times of war, offering insight into the timeless tension between what is right and what is expedient. In the end, however, everyone gets to decide for themselves.

You don’t shoot. You get to decide many times every night at the checkpoint. It takes a lot of guts to not shoot someone.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

NYT v. Sullivan Unfortunately Lives to Fight Another Day

October 27, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: 1A, Blankenship, First Amendment, Gorsuch, Russiagate, Sullivan, Thomas
Posted in: Democracy, Post-Constitution America

Justice Clarence Thomas said it “comes at a heavy cost, allowing media organizations and interest groups ‘to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.’” It is New York Times v. Sullivan, America’s defining defamation law and it unfortunately lives to fight another day. Or mess one up.

Thomas, along with others on the Supreme Court, declined earlier this month to revisit the landmark First Amendment decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, rebuffing a request (the case involved a man falsely accused in the press of being a felon) to take another look at decades-old precedent that created a high bar for public figures to claim defamation in civil suits. Since 1964 the media relied on the case to fend off costly defamation lawsuits brought by public figures. The ruling established the requirement that public figures show “actual malice” by the press before they can succeed in a libel dispute.

Defamation is untruths commonly referred to as libel if in print. Five standards have to be met when the defamation takes places between the media and a public figure: 1) the defamatory words have been published; 2) The person being defamed was identified by the statements; 3) The remarks had a negative impact on the person’s reputation; 4) The named Defendant wrote the defamatory remarks; 5) The published information is demonstrably false or was published with a reckless disregard for the truth. That means it was published without investigating whether it was accurate.

New York Times v. Sullivan held the First Amendment protects media even when they publish false statements, as long as they did not act with actual malice. What happened in the case was civil rights leaders had run a full-page fund raising ad in the Times, describing “an unprecedented wave of terror” by the police against peaceful demonstrators in Montgomery, Alabama. Not all the bad things they accused the cops of doing were true, and made the police look worse then they were. So L.B. Sullivan, in charge of the cops in Montgomery, sued the New York Times for libel, claiming they printed something they knew was false to harm his reputation. After losing in a lower court, the Times appealed to the Supreme Court and won.

The Times argued if a newspaper had to check the accuracy of every criticism of every public official, a free press would be severely limited, and that the 1A required the margin of error to fall on the side of the media in the cases of public officials. In short, mistakes were going to be made even with good intentions by the media. The Court created a new standard for libel of a public figure, “actual malice” defined in short as having the knowledge that something was false or published with “reckless disregard” for truth. Justice William Brennan asserted America’s “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” Free and open debate about the conduct of public officials, the Court reasoned, was more important than occasional, factual errors that might damage officials’ reputations. The standards laid out in Sullivan are why The New York Times has not lost a libel case in America ever since.

In the recent case the Court just refused to hear (Thomas still wants to review Sullivan but said the current case is not the right vehicle for that), Don Blankenship v. NBC Universal, local media labeled Blankenship a felon, causing him to lose a run for the West Virginia Senate, he maintains. The truth is that Blankenship committed a misdemeanor and was sentenced to one day less than if the case had involved a felony charge. In arguing for Blankenship to a lower court, his attorneys wrote “The actual malice standard poses a clear and present danger to our democracy. New York Times v. Sullivan and its progeny grant the press a license to publish defamatory falsehoods that misinform voters, manipulate elections, intensify polarization, and incite unrest.”

Attorneys for the media outlets successfully urged the justices not to take up the case, arguing the reporting mistakes were honest ones. “There is good reason why the actual malice standard of New York Times has been embraced for so long and so often,” the media organizations told the justices. “At its essence, the standard protects ‘erroneous statements honestly made.’ While it permits recovery for falsehoods uttered with knowledge of falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth, it provides the ‘breathing space’ required for ‘free debate.’ A free people engaged in self-government deserves no less.”

Those are the standard Sullivan arguments. It’s just that Justice Thomas does not agree. The Sullivan ruling and ones elaborating on it, he wrote, “were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law” with “no relation to the text, history or structure of the Constitution… the actual-malice standard comes at a heavy cost.” His colleague Justice Neil Gorsuch, in an earlier statement, wrote “What started in 1964 with a decision to tolerate the occasional falsehood to ensure robust reporting by a comparative handful of print and broadcast outlets has evolved into an ironclad subsidy for the publication of falsehoods by means and on a scale previously unimaginable.”

It may indeed be time for a change. Sullivan was written for a different media world, one dominated by a handful of huge companies like the New York Times which could be held to high standards. They were assumed to be honorable in their work, and if a mistake was made it was most likely an accident. Reporting was just that, news, reported out to the people are accurately as possible. Not so in 2023. The media is a splintered mess, with teenage YouTube influencers reaching vast audiences, challenging the giants of yesterday to a share of the market. These micro-outlets have no fact checking staff, are typically run by people with no journalistic training and maybe not even a high school diploma, and are gloriously, joyfully not trying to be fair and accurate. They traffic instead in gossip and innuendo, smearing together fact and fiction because that attracts eyeballs to their work, their only standard.

This sort of competition affected the mainstream media, which became more and more partisan and less concerned about the truth if a story brought in readers. One need only look at the embarrassing bits of what passed for journalism as major should-know-better outlets like the Times and the Washington Post reported falsehood after falsehood throughout Russiagate and indeed the entire Trump administration. Given the freedom to make mistakes in the name of the First Amendment, these organs instead took that as license to play at the line of reckless disregard for the truth. How else could a Pulitzer prize be awarded in part of placing Trump fixer Michael Cohen in Prague to meet with Russian spies, or claim a Trump Organization email server was instead a secret communications portal to the Kremlin via Alfa Bank? How could the standard in Sullivan meant to promote robust debate end up protecting a serious column in the Washington Post headlined “Here are 18 reasons Trump Could Be a Russian Asset” without the retort of a defamation suit available?

Sullivan was meant to protect the underlying value of debate even in the face of product of carelessness and substandard journalistic methods. Its era has passed, wasted by the modern media on confections like YouTube and frauds like Russiagate. The Times of 1964 earned the right to make mistakes in service to a greater good; the Times of 2023 would embarrass its earlier self in how it has exploited such a gift.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Talk to the American People about Ukraine, Joe

October 20, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: NATO, Nordstrom, SIGAR, ukraine
Posted in: Afghanistan, Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Iraq

America needs to hear from its own president, not Volodymyr Zelensky, about what is going on in Ukraine.

America just can’t get enough of Endless War it seems; otherwise why would it keep getting into one of them? Leaving aside ancient historical examples like Korea (still ongoing) and Vietnam (result was a complete defeat of the U.S. after decades of conflict preceeded by years of U.S. nearly completely funding the failed French war effort there) we have the more modern examples of Iraq and Afghanistan. The former sputtered to defeat for the U.S. after decades of war (counting Gulf War I and the bombing campaigns which accomplished little permanently and Gulf War II which led to empowering Iran in Iraq via Gulf War 2.5) and the latter concluding decisively on the TV August 2021 with the symbolically cluster-futzed final evacuation (memories of Saigon.) Each war started with no real practical goal in mind (remember nation building? The War on Terror, i.e., a war against a tactic?)

With that kind of track record you’d think America would take a breather from Endless War, you know, take a few years off to get its head together, maybe work the fentanyl problem, get the economy together so people other than Democratic commentators can see it growing. But no. Just a scant six months after hosing the last Afghan dust off our boots the U.S. finds itself mired in Ukraine. No clear, realistic goal? Check. Open-ended commitment of U.S. resources? Check. Potential to suck U.S. forces directly into the conflict? Check. Dubious one man celebrity leader? Check. Unclear as hell how Ukraine fits into our national interest, how much more time and money will be expected to achieve whatever our objectives are, and how much Europe plans to contribute to the war taking place in its backyard? Check.

It is time for President Biden to explain some things to the American people.

1) What is the endgame, Joe? Is it democracy in Ukraine? If so, you’re off to a rough start. Zelensky over the past two years conscripted his own citizens, kept young males from the freedom to travel, done away with opposition parties, canceled all future elections indefinitely, consolidated all TV platforms in Ukraine into one state broadcast, dealt harshly with dissidents, and assumed practically one-man rule over the nation, certainly its war. Plus there’s all that about units of the Ukrainian military being actual Nazis. So Joe, what is the plan to bring democracy to Ukraine? It seems only that things have gotten worse since the U.S. intervened to prevent the Russians from doing many of the things Zelensky has already done to his own country. FYI Joe, you’ll recall military imposition of democratic values historically has failed.

2) Or Joe, is the point of the war to force Russia out of what Ukraine claims as its territory? Does that include the territory the U.S. gifted a few years ago to the Russians in the Crimea when under another president all this seemed much less dire? Or just to retake the land back which Russia gained after February 2022? That was the point of the Great 2023 Spring Counter-Offensive, right? Be up front with the propaganda-weary American people about how things are going; the Ukrainians in their offensive using most of the conventional ground-force arms in America’s arsenal, gained back only 143 square miles. The Russians, supposedly on the defensive, gained 331 square miles of land. With the Counter-Offensive now clearly a failure, what is the next step? Is there a plan? How do we define win? “As long as it takes” is not a viable option, it’s just a recipe for another Vietnam, another Afghanistan.

3) What role if any will diplomacy with Russia play in achieving this end game, whatever it is? Have the Russians sought to meet and discuss the war? Has the U.S. offered to meet? If not, why not? Diplomacy can end wars. We know your secretary of state can pick a fight but can he stop one, the real test for his profession? Because it is complicated, we’ll give you a pass on how our own government helped create this situation in the first place, something the American people need to know more about at some point.

4) Speaking of things the American public needs to know about, who blew up the Nordstrom pipeline between Russia and Germany? Is this the kind of war America is in that we would blow up the pipeline to press Germany to further join the fight? Or is it the kind of war where Ukraine would somehow muster the technical know-how to blow up the pipeline to force Germany to further join the fight? Why would the Russians blow up a pipeline that supplies their gas to Germany, a significant source of revenue? Is this war that dirty?

5) The U.S. has appropriated $113 billion dollars to Ukraine, paying for everything from tanks to ambulance drivers’ regular salaries. And what else Joe? What systems are in place for accountability for this money? Could it be that more money simply deepens the quagmire and pushes us closer to direct conflict with Russia? You’ve spoken in the past how accountability lies with the Inspectors General at the Department of Defense, State, and USAID. They point to “a decade of shared experience gained from joint oversight of eight different overseas contingency operations, forgetting the spectacular failure of oversight of these overseas contingency operations,” and how the same agencies covered up waste, fraud, and mismanagement and deliberately mislead the American public on the progress made in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Joe, you need to address opposition to the more formal structure of establishing a Special Inspector General for Ukraine (SIGUR), such as SIGIR in Iraq and SIGAR in Afghanistan. “As much as it takes” is a blank check the American taxpayer needs to know more about. Senator Rand Paul in the spring placed a temporary hold on a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, demanding unsuccessfully Congress insert a provision into the aid package creating an inspector general to oversee the distribution of the aid. As SIGAR noted, “While Afghanistan and Ukraine are very different countries with a history of facing very different threats, many of the challenges U.S. agencies faced in Afghanistan—coordinating efforts, dealing with corruption, and effectively monitoring and evaluating projects and programs—will be the same as the ones they will face in Ukraine.” And speaking of corruption, your own State Department has singled out Ukraine for its corrupt practices, which as you know from Iraq and Afghanistan will seriously dilute any aid. Why resist additional oversight?

6) We know there are American Special Forces on the ground in Ukraine, and America forces in command and control roles in the ongoing fight. Are there redlines, either promised to Zelensky or just for yourself, Joe, to trigger a larger U.S. direct role in Ukraine? What would it take to have more “advisers” on the ground, or American air power, or American leadership embedded with Ukrainian troops in the field? At what point in escalation would you agree Congress needs to formally weigh in? And no fair making it all OK by calling the deployments “NATO” instead of American. A Russia-NATO scuffle is a Russia-U.S. scuffle.

No more malarkey, Joe. Time to talk to the American people about Ukraine.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

General Mark Milley – An Evil of the Trump Era

October 12, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: Coup, DOD, insubordination, insurrection, January 6, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark, Milley
Posted in: Biden, Democracy, Military

One of the evils of the Trump era was that illegal, immoral, and at times unconstitutional acts were raised to high standards if they seemed to chip away at Trump somehow. So a fake dossier, which consumed several years and millions of dollars of American life, was brushed off with in the end a fine from the elections commission, not someone going to jail for lying to the FBI. So it is now with General Mark Milley, the Left’s newest bestest friend in violating the Constitution in order to save the Constitution from Trump.

A slithering little piece of hagiography in The Atlantic about Milley (published while he was still technically Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position he goes to great pains to explain should be apolitical while being hella political) might have just been that, a chance to kick the dog one more time without consequence, except for the fact that Milley clearly has higher intentions in Washington (or at least to sell books) and most of all because Trump stands close to a second term. The article hashes over the usual, proclaiming Trump an existential threat to Mom and apple pie, never mind democracy, all without details or explanation. Readers of The Atlantic just know it is true and the author, Jeffrey Goldberg, sees no reason to expand on the idea. The real danger here is not poor journalism (we’re used to it) but the promotion of the idea that Trump is inherently dangerous and without men like General Milley willing to bend the rules and warp the Constitution we will all die in some Trumpian nuclear hissy fit.

It is important to restate at this point that Trump finished his four years as president. He started no new wars. He did not launch nuclear attacks on Iran or North Korea, nor antagonize nuclear power Russia closer to the edge of one. He came as close as any modern president to some sort of rapprochement with North Korea. Trump never used the Insurrection Act to send the military against lawful protesters in the United States. It is worth remembering because Milley’s comments create the impression of something very different.

A healthy portion of The Atlantic article details what Milley felt was Trump’s disrespect for the military (Trump’s deferments but not Biden’s are mentioned liberally.) The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg writes. “Milley’s family venerated the military, and Trump’s attitude toward the uniformed services seemed superficial, callous, and, at the deepest human level, repugnant.” Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, Goldberg continued, “in addition to other former Trump administration officials, also argued the former president had such contempt for the military that it made it challenging to explain concepts of honor, sacrifice and duty. That sour view of the armed forces, alongside Trump being unfit to serve as president among other points of contention, made Milley’s first 16 months as chairman far more difficult than he anticipated.” “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” retired three-star general James Dubik, one of the general’s mentors.

One wonders about that disrespect for the military, and how a candid Milley might characterize the actions of commanders Bush and Obama. Was invading Afghanistan when the 9/11 perpetrators came mostly from Saudi the act of a sane man? How about lying to create an excuse to invade Iraq? What about the bombing of Libyan infrastructure, the results of which were on display for the world recently as tens of thousands drowned in a broken-dam flood there? Over 7,000 U.S. service members, plus near millions of civilians, died in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Are those sane acts? Should Milley or one of his counterparts have acted unconstitutionally to stop them? See what happens when one man determines he’s smarter than the rest?

Milley, while speaking out of one side of his mouth about the sanctity of the chain of command and the president’s role as commander-in-chief, goes on to call Trump a “nuclear monarch” and bemoan the fact that Trump alone could order the use of nuclear weapons as if that was something new. Milley then says without batting an eyelash that during the final days of the Trump administration he took the extraordinary step of having key military officers swear an oath to him promising to involve Milley in any decisions “weird or unusual.” Milley called together senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center on January 8 and “instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.” Milley says his fear (without evidence, of course) was that Trump would initiate a nuclear war with Iran after losing the 2020 presidential election. Milley was out to break the chain of command to stop it, which you see was A-O.K. because breaking all the rules if you possess the judgement of General Milley is itself A-OK.

His other brush with insubordination was two phone calls to General Li Zuo cheng, leader of China’s People’s Liberation Army, in the days surrounding January 6, assuring the PLA that the U.S. had no plans to launch a first strike against China. Milley was not ordered to do this, he just did it because he felt on his own Trump might launch the nukes as a bizzaro-world way to stay in office after the “insurrection” of January 6 failed. Oh yeah, that insurrection — Milley, an alleged student of history — claims was America’s “Reichstag moment.” He called Trump’s statements “The gospel of the Führer.”

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Trump and the 14th Amendment

October 4, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: 14th Amendment, disqualify, election, Section Three
Posted in: Democracy, Trump

In the developing world the party in power does away with its opponents one of three ways: a bullet to the head, throwing them in jail or kicking them off the ballot. Good to see America, Leader of the Free World, is already at work on two of the three.

With it becoming ever-clearer that nothing in the courts is likely to stop Trump — polls show he can still win as a convicted felon from a jail cell — attention has turned to the third dirty solution, driving him off the ballot in as many states as possible to enable a Joe Biden walk-on win. The vehicle for this is supposedly the 14th Amendment, Section Three.

Section Three was ratified in 1868 following the Civil War as a way to keep former Confederate officials out of government. It reads in whole “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.” (emphasis added)

The obvious ploy is to claim Trump engaged in some sort of insurrection on January 6 and with that making him ineligible to be president, his name should be automatically (self-enacting) removed from all ballots. Easier said than done; this use of the 14th Amendment is malarkey, will not succeed, and is simply another attempt at politically decapitating Donald Trump instead of beating him at the ballot box.

The problems with the 14th Amendment strategy begin with the question of whether the prohibition still exists. Written in 1868 to affect Confederate officials, the Article was overturned by Congress on behalf of several individuals. They could do the same for Trump. Then in 1872, the disabilities were removed, by a blanket act, from all persons except Senators and Representatives of the Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh Congresses, officers in the judicial, military, and naval service of the United States, heads of departments, and foreign ministers of the United States. Twenty-six years later, Congress enacted law that said the disability imposed by Section Three… incurred heretofore, is hereby removed.

Further standing in the way of actually using 14/3 against Trump is the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Powell v McCormack, which held a state cannot require of a congressional candidate declarations of loyalty, or affidavits averring lack of intent to seek forcible overthrow of the government. The decision went on to clarify that it was unconstitutional to require any requirements for office other than those already stated in Article I (age, residency, citizenship.) Loyalty to the United States or to its government is not listed as one of the standing qualifications for membership in Congress.

Is Trump subject to Section Three? President Trump was unique among all of his predecessors in that he did not hold any prior government position before he took the presidential oath of office in 2017. Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment could only disqualify Trump if the presidential oath he took on that date was as an “Officer of the United States.”

Also left undefined is the standard of proof for “insurrection.” As a crime, insurrection has its legal definition. Trump, however, is not charged with insurrection (or sedition or rebellion) in any of the cases he now faces.

The 14th Amendment in its Section One also provides for due process, of which the adherents of 14/3 prescribe none, claiming the section is self-enacting and needs no enabling legislation or procedure.

Section Three remained largely dormant for many decades.  January 6 (as well as a Pennsylvania Law Review article  claiming Trump doesn’t qualify to serve as president under 14/3) have prompted renewed interest in the provision and its on and off again history. Active 14/3 challenges to specific candidates have been brought in Indiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and New Mexico, with contested offices ranging from County Commissioner to Senator (but not yet Trump.)  Issues have emerged, including whether Section Three has been repealed; whether Congress has sole power to disqualify its members; whether voters have standing to challenge under Section Three; and questions of subject matter jurisdiction and federalism. Absent action by Congress (in process though not expected to succeed) the arguments over Section Three demand either that the whole thing be forgotten to history where it belongs, or the Supreme Court step in to sort out the significant legal issues, not the least of which is state versus federal power.

If you are keeping track of steps into the abyss, take a look at the core of what some current legal thinkers believe is 14/3: “Partisan officials in state governments, without specific authorization or checks and balances, should apply broad and uncertain definitions to decide who can run for office in a republic, when responsible officials with clear statutory and constitutional authority have not done so.” Seems instead like something for voters to decide, not out-of-context legalese from a previous century. This isn’t public policy, or even sound jurisprudence. This is a politicized legal fight. Sound democratic to you? Or maybe more like Democratic?

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Court Moves to End Govt Censorship by Proxy in Social Media

September 30, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: 1A, COVID, First Amendment, proxy censorship
Posted in: Biden, Democracy, Post-Constitution America

If you think your social media is being edited and blocked to press a certain point of view, it is. If you think the government is trying to get you to think a certain way, it is. There’s no more hiding this behind dummy allegations of conspiracy theories.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled the Biden White House and the FBI violated the First Amendment by improperly driving social media companies’ decisions to remove or suppress posts on Covid and election topics. The ruling is a step toward bringing social media under the umbrella of the First Amendment and ending proxy censorship, and sets up a major Supreme Court battle over the censoring free speech as demanded by the Biden administration.

Specifically, the appeals judges wrote the “White House, the CDC, the FBI, and a few other agencies urged the platforms to remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites. And, the platforms seemingly complied. They gave the officials access to an expedited reporting system, downgraded or removed flagged posts, and deplatformed users. The platforms also changed their internal policies to capture more flagged content and sent steady reports on their moderation activities to the officials. That went on through the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 congressional election, and continues to this day.”

The judges wrote the White House “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences.” They also found the White House “significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, all in violation of the First Amendment.” The decision found although the platforms stifled the speech, it was government officials who “coerced, threatened, and pressured social-media platforms to censor” through private communications and legal threats,” i.e., censorship by proxy.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

The Political Assassination of Donald Trump: Shots Fired

September 22, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: 1A, FBI, First Amendment, georgia, J6, January 6, Mar-a-Lago, Russiagate, Steele
Posted in: 2020, Biden, Democracy, Trump

Democrats remain terrified of Donald Trump and will continue to do their worst to keep him from the ballot, where he has beaten them before. Political assassination attempts stretch from the near-comical to the deadly serious.

The most current attempt harkens back to one of the earlier ones. A handful of lawyers discovered the 14th Amendment, hidden away in plain sight inside the Constitution, actually was designed to drive Trump from the ballot. The Amendment, Article 3, states government officials who supported insurrection against the United States were not eligible for future office. Now despite that this was written to address the question of what to do with Confederate officials following the Civil War, modern lawyers have decided: a) Trump made a speech on January 6 as part of an insurrection and so b) his name cannot appear on any state ballot. Left undiscussed is who the hell are “they” to determine J6 was an actual insurrection on scale with the Civil War and not some naughty MAGA cosplay with absolutely zero chance of altering the election results, and the fact that Article 1 of the same Amendment mentions due process, of which the current legal thinking includes none.

This all reminds of the early Trump days citing of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, basically saying a president could not accept gifts from foreign countries (full disclosure: one of the worst Emoluments violators was eighth President Martin Van Buren, no relation.) The thinking way back in 2016 was the Founders had this scenario in mind: Trump owns some foreign hotels. Foreign people stay there. Some of the foreigners were government officials. Some tiny portion of each stay went into Donald’s pocket. Shazam! He was guilty of accepting official foreign gifts and violating the Emoluments Clause.

But that was all small change; the real money on getting rid of Trump before he was even sworn in, or handicapping his administration if he took office, was Russiagate. It was all the rage in 2016 and beyond — Trump colluded with the Russians because they had a tape of him with prostitutes doing Golden Showers. Or because he wanted to build a hotel in Moscow, one or the other. There was proof everywhere and Robert Mueller’s corpse was shocked back to life to investigate it all ahead of an impeachment-lynching party. In the end the whole thing was made up. A multi-year effort involving the three-letter agencies FBI, CIA, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS was based on tall tales from anonymous sources sifted into the zeitgeist by a former MI6 operative named Chris Steele. Oh, right, and Steele was paid entirely by the Clinton campaign.

The next swing at the piñata came from some little scab of a Lieutenant Colonel on the National Security Council, and some punks at the State Department, known as Impeachment 1.0. Using a cutout “whistleblower,” the cabal alleged Trump temporarily withheld arms from the Ukraine (before it became our 51st state under Joe Biden) until Kiev investigated and turned over the dirt on the Biden family. It turned out Trump did indeed temporarily withhold arms from the Ukraine (before it became our 51st state under Joe Biden) hoping Kiev would investigate and turn over the dirt on the Biden family. This is known as “foreign policy” or an “investigation.” Somehow the impeachment hinged on one transcripted phone call by Trump, so the evidence was not even in question, just how stupid the interpretation could be. Nothing stuck and the process failed to remove Trump from office.

After all that there was Impeachment 2.0 which had something to do with January 6, wasn’t finished until Trump had already left office, and did not matter because, significantly for the 14th Amendment crowd, Trump was not convicted of incitement or insurrection.

The broader problem is short of simply shooting Trump in the head, the guy never seems to go down. Every effort, and there were many, failed to get him off the ballot in 2016, cripple his administration, or drive him from the White House. Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020 and that should have ended the matter. Trump should have taken his seat on The View and all these efforts to depose him should have faded into political history. The specific problem is that Trump never stopped running for president, and now must finally be stopped. The plan this time is to use the judiciary to achieve what it looks like the ballot box cannot, literally locking Trump in jail in hopes that from behind bars he cannot become president. There are five current efforts.

First up is Stormy Daniels again. Somehow a partisan prosecutor in a fully Democratic district managed to squeeze 34 felony counts out of this, centered on falsifying business records, which Trump is accused of doing to cover up the hush money payments to Daniels. Now leaving aside there is nothing illegal per se about “hush money,” (people receive payments all the time as part of nondisclosure agreements) this attempt to throw Trump in jail will rely on witnesses as pristine as Stormy herself, followed by stand-up guys like Michael Cohen. If the jury is at least close to fair when seated, the case has little chance of jailing Trump.

Second in line is a civil defamation case financial judgement. Four months after a jury found that Donald Trump defamed advice columnist Jean Carroll, a judge ruled still more of the ex-president’s comments about her were libelous. The decision means an upcoming second trial will concern only how much more he has to pay her. No possibility of jail time.

Next is the so-called Mar-a-Lago documents case. This centers on the former president endangering national security by mishandling classified documents after leaving office. Additionally, the case looks at how Trump obstructed FBI efforts to take back the documents. It will delve into the minutia of the classification system, and likely invoke the Supreme Court to decide how much leeway a former president has in declassifying documents. It is no small matter, legal-issue wise, as it affects not only Trump but every president to come (Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton also unlawfully had classified documents in their possession outside of the office but we don’t seem to care much about these cases.) Classification cases cases which don’t involve major espionage or spillage are usually settled by fines, as may be this one, unless the government can make a big deal about the obstruction part. A lot depends on proving Trump knew he was doing something wrong, mens rea, a tough ask with a fella like Trump who talks pretty. The matter is unlikely to result in jail time.

The Georgia election interference case, like Impeachment 1.0, seems to hinge on a single phone call, in this instance an ambiguous request by Trump to an election official to find him some more votes. Ambiguous in the sense that one reading is Trump requesting some sort of recount, while another is he is demanding the official create votes by some nefarious means. Another case of a partisan Democratic prosecutor in a fully Democratic district showing how her predecessors once rigged trials by choosing all-white juries. The new feature here is the prosecutor has come up with not only 13 felony counts against Trump himself stemming from a single incident, but also charged 18 associates, including Rudy Giuliani (once America’s mayor, how fast the looks fade) with various crimes. The implication is one of those people will turn evidence on Trump to save their own skin. The problem is that the Georgia case did not have any successful interfering; Trump still lost the state. That means the whole thing is going to bog down in conspiracy accusations — boring — and fail to capture public attention. Trump’s lawyers are also actively seeking a change of venue to get the case to more neutral jury selection territory. If they succeed, the chances of success against Trump seem slim. A guilty conclusion with some sort of fine seems likely.

The prosecution which has the greatest potential of shaping the next part of the Trump story is also likely to be the first major case heard, in March 2024, regarding Trump’s role in the events of January 6. At stake is not only a good portion of Trump’s political future, but also very serious questions about the First Amendment. What can someone legally say and do after losing an election? Of all the charges, incitement is not on the list, though it looks in part as if Trump is being held responsible for the actions of the mob. The charges focus again on conspiracy, though this time the stakes are very high, conspiracy to defraud the United States and its voters, practically a hanging offense. The J6 mob (and Trump) had no chance of overturning the 2020 election, so in some ways conspiracy is a thin thread to suspend the whole affair from. On the other hand, it may be easy to prove, especially if Mike Pence or another senior official turned evidence in their depositions and testified against Trump. The seriousness of the matter points towards jail time, as has been the case with all the other J6 defendants. It may not be the future of our democracy at stake, but it is certainly a good shot at the future of Donald Trump if the prosecution can wrap things up before the election.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Thomas “T.J.” Jefferson and Race-Based School Admissions

September 14, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: affirmative action, affirmative admissions, Coalition for TJ, Fairfax, Harvard, proxy, T.J., Thomas Jefferson High School, Title VI, Virginia
Posted in: Democracy

White parents and Asian parents are fighting over how many black students should be allowed into Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Alexandria, Virginia. The school, universally known as “T.J.,” is among the finest STEM high schools in the United States. Given its role as a feeder school into the upper echelons of tech in America, this is more than another culture war battle. It is not an exaggeration to say it affects national security, which is why the issue is likely to be sorted out by the Supreme Court.

From its beginnings until summer of 2020, the only way into prestigious T.J. for residents was to pass the rigorous entrance exam. Then in 2020, following the death of George Floyd, T.J. officials became concerned about their negligible number of black and Hispanic students and changed admissions standards. The test was gone, replaced by a  holistic review that included “experience factors, including students who are economically disadvantaged, English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools.”

The results were as intended: without the entrance test, black students grew to seven percent from one percent of the class, while the number of Asian American students fell to 54 percent from 73 percent, the lowest share in years. The number of white students also fell, but no one seemed to care that they accounted for only 22 percent of admissions, despite being 65 percent of the county population. A group of mostly Asian American parents objected to the new plan and started the Coalition for T.J. The coalition filed a lawsuit with the help of the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. Instead of seeing weighting of experience factors as a way to level the playing field for underrepresented groups (or whether such a thing was even necessary) they saw racism. The experience factors were just a work-around for straight up race-based decisions.

After some action in lower courts, in May 2023 the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the new admissions process, finding T.J. had not discriminated against Asian American students in its admissions policies. The appellate court, in a two to one ruling, found that there was not sufficient evidence the changes were adopted with discriminatory intent. Writing for the majority, Judge Robert King, a Clinton appointee, said that the school had a legitimate interest in “expanding the array of student backgrounds.” Too bad for the Asians, the on-and-off again minority; there’s only so many seats available at T.J. The court finding was that T.J.’s essay-based admission policy was race neutral and was not a proxy for race-based decisions. T.J. was able to make racially-motivated decisions without appearing legally to make racially-motivated decisions.

This was of course all before the June 2023 Supreme Court rulings in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, which asked three questions: can race be a factor for admission, has Harvard violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by penalizing Asian American applicants by engaging in racial balancing, overemphasizing race and rejecting workable race-neutral alternatives, and whether a university can reject a race-neutral alternative because it would change the composition of the student body, without proving that the alternative would cause a dramatic sacrifice in academic quality or the educational benefits of overall student-body diversity. In short, can race continue to be an admission factor? The emphasis was on displacing Asian American students with black ones, which is why the Supreme Court cases saw amici filings by the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, the Asian American Coalition For Education, and the Asian American Legal Foundation. Also included was the Coalition for T.J.

The Pacific Legal Foundation now wants the Supreme Court to overturn the Appeals Court decision, arguing that T.J.’s new admissions policies disadvantage Asian American applicants. “They are, in our view, using proxies for race in order to get a racial result,” said Joshua Thompson, a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation. In its filing Monday asking the Supreme Court to review the case, the Foundation argued that T.J.’s admissions plan was “intentionally designed to achieve the same results as overt racial discrimination.” Specifically referring to the Supreme Court’s June affirmative action decision, the filing said that its “guarantees might mean little if schools could accomplish the same discriminatory result through race-neutral proxies.” Is T.J. flouting the most recent Supreme Court decision?

It should be a helluva fight if the Supreme Court takes the T.J. case. In a forthcoming paper in the Stanford Law Review quoted in the New York Times, Sonja Starr, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Chicago, writes the plaintiffs are “laying the groundwork for a much bigger legal transformation” that could ban any public policy effort to close racial gaps, ultimately reverberating in “areas beyond education, such as fair housing, environmental permitting, and social welfare policies.”

In tension are the most basic of rights, that institutions should not discriminate based on race versus a more modern belief that institutions have a fundamental role to play in achieving racial balance in schools and the workplace. The Court’s decision in Harvard, et al, did not address the proxy concept, that by focusing on say essays schools could achieve racist ends by proxy means. In dissent at the Appeals Court, Judge Allison Rushing wrote the majority refused “to look past the policy’s neutral varnish” and consider instead “an undisputed racial motivation and an undeniable racial result.” Judge Rushing, appointed by Donald Trump, added that the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection “would be hollow if governments could intentionally achieve discriminatory ends under cover of neutral means.” She means, like T.J. is doing.

The T.J. case matters; if the Supreme Court rules for the Asian American parents’ group, that means race-neutral admissions will be the next in line to fall after the Court’s June affirmative action ruling.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Trump and Kryptonite

September 6, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: conspiracy, election, January 6, Trump
Posted in: Biden, Democracy

As of summer 2023 we have in America reached an amazing place politically: the Republican front-runner and very possibly the next re-president of the United States, Donald Trump, is campaigning while basically on bail in four different jurisdictions. And nobody in America cares much. Actually, Americans sort of care, but not in any way that makes more sense than not caring. In the words of another pundit, “cheer, scream, or shrug… and sip a banana republic daquiri.”

Americans, depending on their beliefs, expect and would be satisfied if Trump was either in a jail cell or the Oval Office as of January 2025. Painting with a broad brush, for Republicans, they are convinced the charges against Trump are Third World-style political warfare waged by Democrats and mean little. Democrats see Trump as a Great Satan and view the charges as the last, best (after two impeachments and Mueller) hope for our democracy. Despite accomplishing fairly little as president (the Supreme Court appointments, though impactful, were basically luck, and no LBTQ concentration camps were opened or nuclear wars started) another four years of Trump will either save us or destroy us. Friends, there is little gray area out there, and even less appetite for the reality of the cases against Trump.

So maybe it is not such a surprise that 38 percent of us feel “exhaustion” over the possibility of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. Some 52 percent feel either sadness or fear, or both, over the prospect. There is one area where a significant share of each party finds common ground: the belief that the country is headed toward failure. Overall, 37 percent of registered voters say the problems are so bad that we are in danger of failing as a nation, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. Some 56 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said we are in danger of such failure. Around 20 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they feel the same way.

In the face of all this, the challenge for the judicial system to preserve faith in our democracy comes in several ways.

For example, how clear and “obvious” are the charges in each instance? There is a ever-growing distrust in public institutions, whether the government in general for failing to respond to public demands for more or less abortion rights, or the electoral system as a whole, or in this specific case, whether the judicial system can respond to what some perceive as unfair charges against Donald Trump. And make no mistake, each side sees a kind of unfairness in play; Republicans by and large see the charges as attempts to drive Trump out of the election or cripple him as a candidate while Democrats see the charges as a whole as the best of bad options, charging defamation when the real crime is rape, charging conspiracy when the real crime is the attempted overthrow of our democratic system.

Prosecutors must make the charges plain and of the “make sense” type, with no “ambitious charging.” Everything must be able to be explained and pass the sniff test to all but the most hardened opponents, whether they agree or not. This will be especially challenging for the thought crimes, the claimed conspiracies, whether Trump is somehow still guilty of something even though he not only did not overthrow the government and reverse the election, but that he had no realistic pathway to doing so. People will remember the impeachments beta, the Mueller Report, which came close to charging Trump with obstruction of an investigation which actually cleared him and found no predicate crime. The defense will try and muddle the waters and leave the public with a sense that Trump did nothing wrong really but the system was set up to get him somehow (not a hard case to make in several of the total of 90-some counts.) The more prosecutorial creativity (example, use of RICO in Georgia) and the more attempts to squeeze events into legal boxes they don’t quite fit in, the more challenge for the system to find a balance in explaining what is happening for the public to digest. Walking the public through the the minefield of ambiguity over classification in the Mar-a-Lago case is an example. Anything that is seen as partisan (conspiracy to do this, conspiracy to do that) fails the democracy in a mighty way.

Can the judicial system keep the language neutral? The most obvious partisan tells come from the language used, calling January 6 an insurrection for example. The judicial system should stick itself to neutral language and press both sides to do the same, perhaps agreeing to some terminology. Falling into the media trap of weaponizing the language is a real danger. Trump must be prosecuted based on what he did, not who he is. Acts must be on-their-face criminal, or they will be seen as political, Trump convicted of something, anything, just because he’s Trump and we need to send him to jail because all the other kryptonite failed. It’s a big ask; already the judge in his J6 trial has called those events a “mob attack” on “the very foundation of our democracy” and branded Trump’s claim the 2020 election was stolen a conspiracy theory.

Venue is important, and the system must show the flexibility to move cases to neutral venues when possible. Trying a case in a place like Manhattan or Fulton County, Georgia risks appearing to be the equivalent of an all-white jury in a 1950’s racial case. The jury pool in both states swings decidedly Democrat. Yet even then Salon decries the fact that a non-rigged jury might ruin the plan to convict Trump; “one MAGA juror can ruin it all,” they write. Both venues feature a local Democratic prosecutor (Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis) in a one-party jurisdiction. Would the indictments even have come down elsewhere?

Lastly, can the judicial system be seen as “timely?” Most everyone agrees the judicial system is failing on timing. Prosecutors in one batch of charges stemming from the events of January 6 want the trial to start at the beginning of the new year, ridiculously early for a case that has already produced 11.5 million pages of discovery (“Even assuming we could begin reviewing the documents today, we would need to proceed at a pace of 99,762 pages per day to finish the government’s initial production by its proposed date for jury selection,” a Trump lawyer wrote. “That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.” Can it all be relevant?) Lawyers for Trump instead asked a judge to push back the proceeding until April 2026, nearly a year and a half after the 2024 election and some five years after the fact when Trump will either be immune one way or another as president, or a regular on Dancing with the Stars having failed at the polls. Both political sides walk away sure the game is rigged. The other cases against Trump face similar demands to begin very soon or for lengthy delays.

They’re right in a way over at MSNBC, democracy is indeed on trial, but not in the way most people who say that mean. Instead, what is on trial is our judicial system as it struggles to answer the cornerstone question here: can the system rise above partisanship, even when partisanship is the intent of one side or both, and produce results which however reluctantly will be considered fair by the majority of Americans? A “no” answer risks further shattering of public trust in our institutions, and further polarization of our politics, if not violence. It may just be that it is not whether you win or lose in this battle, but how the game is played.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Lessons from Afghanistan for the Reconstruction of Ukraine

August 22, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: Advana, Corruption, SIGAR, ukraine, USAID
Posted in: Afghanistan, Economy, Iraq, Military

Though some say it is wishful thinking to be talking today about the reconstruction of Ukraine (they have to win first), it is never too early to pull out lessons learned from the last fiasco, in hopes they can be baked in to whatever eventual process is undertaken. That’s why a group of senators asked the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to put together a brief list of things not to do again in the course of rebuilding Ukraine.

SIGAR was in charge of overseeing the two-decades-long, $146 billion spend to rebuild Afghanistan. Over the course of years, in addition to the 1,297 audit recommendations SIGAR made to recover funds, improve agency oversight, and increase program effectiveness, they also made 143 sector-specific recommendations to executive agencies as part of the agency’s Lessons Learned Program. So while few people seemed to listen to them regarding Afghanistan, that doesn’t mean they had nothing to say, especially as regards to the next reconstruction program in Ukraine. As SIGAR notes, “While Afghanistan and Ukraine are very different countries with a history of facing very different threats, many of the challenges U.S. agencies faced in Afghanistan—coordinating efforts, dealing with corruption, and effectively monitoring and evaluating projects and programs—will be the same as the ones they will face in Ukraine.”

Trigger Warning: most of what SIGAR cautioned about for Afghanistan was exactly the same stuff its sister organization, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), cautioned earlier about in that war. Everything was equally ignored. It can be very frustrating to watch a whole-of-government approach to repeating one’s predecessor’s mistakes. It can be even more frustrating to have participated in it all, as I did, overseeing two reconstruction teams in Iraq while I still worked for the State Department.

Here’s a wild prediction: at some point in the future there will be a Special Inspector General for Ukraine Reconstruction (SIGUR!) which will watch the same mistakes from Iraq and Afghanistan repeated, with no one listening. Creating SIGUR has already been suggested; Senator Rand Paul back in May temporarily placed a hold on a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, demanding unsuccessfully Congress insert a provision into the aid package creating an inspector general to oversee the distribution of the aid.

Nonetheless, there is always hope (the SIGAR people must be the most optimistic people on earth) in putting down on paper the blindingly obvious when billions of dollars and national credibility are at stake. So, from SIGAR with love, here are the seven lessons from Afghanistan for the reconstruction of Ukraine:

— Lesson 1: The U.S. government struggled to develop a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve in Afghanistan and imposed unrealistic timelines that led to wasteful and counterproductive programs.

Now who would think lacking a strategy and indeed any agreed-upon goal would slow things down? In Ukraine, will the goal be raising the entire country to Western European standards? Favoring the anti-Russian areas? Trying to buy loyalty in the pro-Russian areas? Or as in Afghanistan (as in Iraq, just substitute the two country names from here on out) simply spending money willy-nilly in hopes a coherent strategy might emerge in retrospect. Unrealistic timelines (variously, success before the next local election, before the next U.S. election, before the military change of command, before my tour as team leader is up…) meant most timelines were ignored. Hope they do better in Ukraine.

— Lesson 2: Lack of effective coordination—both within the U.S. government and across the international coalition—was a major obstacle to success in Afghanistan and resulted in a disjointed patchwork of ineffective efforts, rather than a united and coherent approach.

There’s that naughty word, coherent, again. In Iraq the Italian reconstruction team did not talk to never mind take direction from the Americans; they were too focused on providing commercial opportunities for their countrymen. USAID was really into schools and bridges, whereas State focused on “democracy building” such as empowering women in medieval Islamic societies via local modern drama clubs. The hope that synergy would emerge was consumed by the same thing that makes a million monkeys typing away at a million typewriters still unlikely to produce a great work of literature. And they may need all that time; reconstruction in Ukraine is expected to take decades.

— Lesson 3: Though viewed as our greatest strength, the level of financial assistance in Afghanistan was often our greatest weakness.

Like with teenagers and booze, too much money can only lead to trouble. Billions were spent with little oversight, leading directly to corruption. The money tsunami “overwhelmed the Afghan economy and fueled massive corruption from senior government officials in Kabul to low-level officials around the country. This corruption posed a critical threat to the mission.” SIGAR found “in Afghanistan, the U.S. government spent too much money, too quickly, in a country that was unable to absorb it” and warns of the same in the future Ukraine reconstruction.

Lacking a trusted banking system connected to international standard systems, business in Iraq and Afghanistan was done in cash, vast amounts of paper money brought in to the country on pallets and stored in copier paper boxes stacked alongside the safes which could not hold a tenth of the moolah on hand. It begged to be misused.

And then there was the unequal distribution of reconstruction funds. The military always had more than anyone else and so always won every discussion about what to do next. As SIGAR noted, when USAID tried to stop implementing projects in areas where they could not be monitored or evaluated, the military simply used funds from its Commander’s Emergency Response Program to implement those projects anyway—often in even less secure areas, where projects were unlikely to succeed.

— Lesson 4: Corruption was an existential threat to the reconstruction mission in Afghanistan.

This will be a massive issue in a place like Ukraine (it remains the most corrupt country in Europe excluding Russia; according to USAID, rooting out corruption in Ukraine will be a generational challenge) with its very organized crime emboldened by “lost” American weapons from the battlefield and new members with military experience. Rebuilding Ukraine means fighting graft first, claimed the Washington Post. Ukraine has “entrenched patronage networks that involve senior officials who can inhibit reconstruction and international aid by wasting assistance and damaging the government’s ability to deliver services. Combating corruption is difficult because it requires the cooperation and political will of those elites who benefit the most from it. Few cooperate willingly,” SIGAR wrote. Militia leaders, warlords, oligarchs, meh, they’re all pretty much the same problem in different headgear.

— Lesson 5: Building and reforming the Afghan security forces was hindered by their corruption, predation, and chronic dependency on the United States.

The Ukrainian military is 100 percent dependent on the United States for everything from spare parts to uniforms to strategic and tactical leadership. They have already lost the ability to fight on their own. The numbers help tell the story: over the course of two decades in Afghanistan, the United States spent an average of $375 million each month on security assistance. By comparison, the U.S. is currently spending $2.5 billion each month—nearly seven times the average monthly amount it spent in Afghanistan—on security assistance in Ukraine. Intended or not, that buys a lot of dependence.

Meanwhile, as in Afghanistan, the Ukraine’s internal security forces remain rife with corruption and require urgent reform. Ukraine’s police have been largely feared and distrusted by the people they are supposed to serve. In some areas of the country, the police have resembled “a mafia-style organization” that intimidates locals with impunity, warns SIGAR.

— Lesson 6: Tracking equipment provided to Afghan security forces proved challenging well before the government collapsed.

So much military equipment poured haphazardly into a country is sure to see some of it end up in the wrong hands. In Afghanistan, the U.S. was supplying both sides of many encounters, arms leaking out into the countryside via corruption, lack of security, and poor stock keeping. Already in Ukraine, Russian organized crime groups, local crooks, and unauthorized volunteer battalions obtained or stole weapons from Department of Defense security aid meant to arm the Ukrainian military for its defense against Russia, according to an inspector general report revealed as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Military.com. In just a taste of what’s to come, the report shows how U.S. efforts to meet end-use goals for billions in security assistance donated throughout 2022 often failed. Little or no accountability existed on the U.S. side, allowing weapons to be diverted to criminals and opposition forces.

Another Department of Defense (DOD) report made public found employees fell short of requirements for tracking financial aid to Ukraine. The report examined how the DOD was monitoring transactions from over $6.5 billion in funding from the Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act through Advana software, the only authorized reporting platform. Auditors warned DOD’s subpar reporting processes, including use of systems that are unreadable by Advana, could hinder oversight and transparency (the U.S. did not properly track $18.6 billion in aid to Afghanistan, partly because it employed software systems that were either incompatible with one another or incapable of handling the volume of data received. Most projects in Iraq, millions of dollars, were tracked only via a shared Excel spreadsheet.)

— Lesson 7: Monitoring and evaluation efforts in Afghanistan were weak and often measured simple inputs and outputs rather than actual program effectiveness.

In Iraq we evaluated a program’s effectiveness like this: we increased the amount of money we spent one quarter on education by 13 percent. The next quarter we announced a 13 percent improvement in education in our area; it was simple as that.

“Oversight became an afterthought,” wrote SIGAR. “The U.S. government is poor at predicting the resources and length of time necessary to rebuild complex institutions in other countries. The timelines created by U.S. officials ignored conditions on the ground and created perverse incentives to spend quickly and focus on short-term goals. The U.S. government emphasized short-term, tangible projects where money could be spent rapidly and success claimed more immediately over less tangible but potentially more enduring, long-term programming, such as capacity building. Physical security, political stability, and immediate reconstruction needs took priority over the slow, iterative work of building good governance and the rule of law, the foundations for combating corruption.”

There are the lessons, solid suggestions each one. They were largely ignored in Afghanistan and Iraq. Think they’ll do any better in Ukraine?

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Dissent Channel, Afghanistan and Confidentiality

August 7, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: Blinken, Dissent Channel, evacuation
Posted in: Afghanistan, Biden, Democracy

Something quite significant in U.S. diplomatic history is going to take place — a State Department Dissent Channel message, concerning the evacuation and withdrawal from Afghanistan, is going to be shared with Members of Congress.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul announced his panel investigating the final days of American presence in Afghanistan will view the Dissent Channel cable. McCaul threatened to hold Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt if he did not provide him access to the diplomatic cable, which came from a confidential “dissent channel” that allowed State Department officials to discuss views which may be different from  administration policy.

It is believed the July 2021 cable discussed concerns from the rank-and-file diplomatic staff not fully shared by senior embassy executives and management about the upcoming American pullout from the country, warning the U.S.-backed Afghan government could fall. The cable specifically advised an earlier withdrawal date than that ultimately chosen by the Biden Administration, and may have addressed the decision to conduct the entire evacuation from a single civilian airport in Kabul.

So what is the Dissent Channel and why is this particular cable so important?

The Dissent Channel was set up in 1971 during the Vietnam War era as a way for foreign service officers and civil servants at State (as well as United States Agency for International Development, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the former United States Information Agency) to raise concerns with senior management about the direction of U.S. foreign policy, without fear of retribution. The cables (formal, official State internal communications are still referred to as “cables” harking back to early diplomatic days when telegrams were used to communicate between Washington and embassies abroad) are sent to the State Department’s policy planning director, who distributes them to the secretary of state and other top officials, who must respond within 30 to 60 days. There are typically about five to ten each year. “Discouragement of, or penalties for use of, the Dissent Channel are impermissible,” according to the State Department internal regulations.

Use of the Channel covers the scope of diplomatic mission. Historical messages include a dissent over the executive branch’s decision to “initiate no steps to discipline a military unit that took action at My Lai” in Vietnam and the “systematic use of electrical torture, beatings, and in some cases, murder, of men, women, and children by military units in Vietnam.” These actions by U.S. soldiers were “atrocities too similar to those of Nazis.” Another dissent was over the “hypocritical” U.S. support of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, bemoaning that the U.S. missed a “unique opportunity to intervene for once on the right repeat right side” of history. One older atypical dissent cable complained about having to arrange female companionship in Honduras for a visiting U.S. congressman. In the words of one now-declassified cable, “The Dissent Channel can be a mechanism for unclogging the Department’s constipated paper flow” related to employee dissent against current foreign policy actions.

What the Channel does is one thing; who gets to see it is another. Until now, dissent messages have generally been regarded as something sacrosanct not to shown to outsiders and not to be leaked. “Release and public circulation of Dissent Channel messages,” State wrote to one inquirer,” would inhibit the willingness of Department personnel to avail themselves of the Dissent Channel to express their views freely.” The messages were first withheld from the rest of government (and the public) by State under the rules which created the system, and later under the Freedom of Information Act’s (FOIA) “predecisional” Exemption 5, until the 2016 FOIA Improvement Act amendments made it illegal for agencies to use this exemption after 25 years. So sharing the Afghan dissent cable with Members of Congress, especially so soon after the administration’s evacuation policy failed in Afghanistan, is a very big deal at the State Department.

One publicized exception to how closely held dissent messages are took place in 2017 when nearly a thousand State Department Foreign Service Officers signed a five page dissent message opposing President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” which prohibited seven additional Muslim nationalities from entering the U.S., aka “The Muslim Ban.” As a result of an anti-Trump contingent inside generally liberal and mostly Democratic-leaning State, the message was leaked in its entirety. Even more against precedent, Trump’s spokesman Sean Spicer issued an extraordinary public rebuke to the diplomats: “These career bureaucrats have a problem with it? They should either get with the program or they can go.”

An almost-leak (a State Department official provided a draft, though the final version was not published, to The New York Times) took place in 2016 during the Trump-Clinton presidential election, after 51 Foreign Service Officers criticized the Obama administration via the Dissent Channel for failing to do enough to protect civilians in Syria in what was widely seen as an endorsement of Candidate Hillary’s pseudo-promise to put U.S. boots on the ground in Syria. Other Trump-era dissent cables not shared outside the Department called for consultations on Trump’s removal from office, and rebuked the secretary of state for not forcefully condemning the president over January 6.

To fully understand what the Dissent Channel is requires a better understanding of the State Department culture, academic in nature but frighteningly risk adverse. The academic side reflects the Department’s modern origins as being made up of those who were “male, pale, and Yale” where the tradition of loyal opposition holds sway. But it is the risk adverse side of State that tells how important internally revealing the Afghan cable is. Dissent messages are signed, no anonymous ones allowed, and while Secretary Blinken has promised to not show the names of those who signed the Afghan cable to Congress, State senior management will know exactly who wrote what.

In addition, Dissent Channel messages must still be cleared for transmission to the secretary of state in Washington at post, though there is no requirement everyone agree with the contents per se (authorization does not imply concurrence.) So one’s colleagues know who wrote what, potential dynamite in an organization where dissent is otherwise not encouraged and corridor reputation plays a deciding role in promotions and future assignments. It is a significant step to write or sign a dissent cable and despite the regulations’ admonishment that use of the Dissent Channel not be discouraged by supervisors, it is discouraged.

Nobody in Embassy Kabul who signed that dissent message, basically telling their boss the ambassador and the Biden Administration they were wrong, expected to have their opinions shown to Congress; quite the opposite. Blinken, by sharing the cable with Congress, is breaking faith with his institution and with his front line workers in a uncollegial way only imagined by them during the Trump administration. Once upon a time something like that would have called for dissent.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Disinformation, 1984-2023

August 5, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: 1984, 1A, disinformation, First Amendment, FISA, Missouri v. Biden, Orwell, propaganda
Posted in: Biden, Democracy, NSA

Orwell, again. 1984 was prescient on so many concepts that it seems it was written for the Biden era. Underlying it all is the concept of disinformation, the root of propaganda and mind control. So it is in 2023. Just ask FBI Director Chris Wray. Or Facebook.

George Orwell’s novel explores the concept of disinformation and its role in controlling and manipulating society. Orwell presents a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime, led by the Party and its figurehead Big Brother, exerts complete control over its citizens’ lives, including their thinking. The Party employs a variety of techniques to disseminate disinformation and maintain its power. One of the most prominent examples is the concept of “Newspeak,” a language designed to restrict and manipulate thought by reducing the range of expressible ideas. Newspeak aims to replace words and concepts that could challenge or criticize the Party’s ideology, effectively controlling the way people think and communicate (unhomed, misspoke, LGBQTIAXYZ+, nati0nalist, terrorist.)

Orwell also introduces the concept of doublethink, which refers to the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept them both as true. This psychological manipulation technique allows the Party to control the minds of its citizens and make them believe in false information or embrace contradictory ideas without questioning (masks which do not prevent disease transmission are still mandatory.) The Party in 1984 alters historical records and disseminates false information through the Ministry of Truth. This manipulation of historical events and facts aims to control the collective memory of the society in a post-truth era, ensuring that the Party’s version of reality remains unquestioned (war in Ukraine, Iraq, El Salvador, Vietnam, all to protect our freedom at home.)

Through these portrayals, Orwell highlights the dangers of disinformation and its potential to distort truth, manipulate public opinion, and maintain oppressive systems of power. The novel serves as a warning about the importance of critical thinking, independent thought, and the preservation of objective truth in the face of disinformation and propaganda.

Disinformation is bad. But replacing disinformation with censorship and/or replacement with other disinformation is worse. 1984 closed down the marketplace of ideas. So for 2023.

In 2023 America the medium is social media and the Ministry of Truth is the Executive Branch, primarily the FBI. Topics the FBI at one point labeled disinformation and sought to censor in the name of protecting Americans from disinformation include but are not limited to the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Covid lab leak theory, the efficiency and value to society of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines, speech about election integrity and the 2020 presidential election, the security of voting by mail, even parody accounts mocking the president (about Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter.)

When asked before Congress to define disinformation, FBI Director Christopher Wray could not do it, even though it is the basis for the FBI’s campaign to censor Americans. It’s a made up term with no fixed meaning. That gives it its power, like “terrorism” was used a decade or so earlier. Remember “domestic terrorism”? That stretched to cover everything from white power advocates to J6 marchers to BLM protestors to Moms for Liberty. It just can’t be all those things all the time but it can be all those things at different times, as needed. The term “hate speech” is another flexible tool of enforcement and is why efforts to codify banning hate speech under the First Amendment must be resisted so strongly. Same for QAnon. We’ve heard about QAnon for years now but still can’t figure out if it even exists. To read the MSM, you would think it is the most powerful and sinister thing one can imagine yet seems to be imaginary, another Cthulhu. Do they have an office, an email address, a lair somewhere?

In simple words: the government is using social media companies as proxies to censor the contrary thoughts of Americans, all under the guise of correcting misinformation and in direct contrivance of the First Amendment.

How bad does it get? As part of its 2023 investigation into the federal government’s role in censoring lawful speech on social media platforms, the House Committee on the Judiciary issued a subpoena to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, the parent of Google and YouTube. Documents obtained revealed the FBI, on behalf of a compromised Ukrainian intelligence service, requested and, in some cases, directed, the world’s largest social media platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online about the war in Ukraine.

Another tool of thought control is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was supposed to be used to spy on foreigners but has been improperly used against thousands of Americans. Over 100,000 Americans were spied on in 2022, down from three million in 2021.

Does it sound familiar? An amorphous threat is pounded into the heads of Americans (Communism and Red Scares, Covid, terrorism, disinformation) and in its name nearly anything is justified, including in the most recent battle for freedom, censorship. The wrapper is that it is all for our own protection (Biden himself accused social-media companies of “killing people,” the more modern version of the terrorism-era’s “blood on their hands”) with the government assuming the role of knowing what is right and correct for Americans to know. The target in name is always some Ruskie-type foreigner, but in reality morphs to be censorship of our citizens ourselves (stained as “pro-Putin.”) Yet Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the government asked Facebook to suppress true information. He said during the Covid era the scientific establishment within the government asked “for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”

Under President Joe Biden, the government has undertaken “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” That was the extraordinary conclusion reached by a federal judge in Missouri v. Biden. The case exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and its federal agencies have gone to bully social-media platforms into removing political views they dislike. The White House is appealing and attained a stay, hoping to retain this powerful tool of thought control right out of 1984. A victory for censorship of Americans and their thoughts could be the greatest threat to free speech in American history.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

A Victory Over Social Media Censorship

August 3, 2023 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy

In a season of good news for the First Amendment following some important Supreme Court decisions, here’s more to be happy about: a federal judge in Louisiana issued an injunction stopping Biden administration officials from contacting social media companies to block content in what could be a landmark order targeting government censorship and suppression of online postings. The judge ruled the Biden administration likely violated the First Amendment by censoring unfavorable views on social media over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, calling the efforts “Orwellian.” It was the first formal acknowledgement of a systemic program by the government to use the social media giants as proxies to censor the speech of Americans.

The injunction is a major development in the fight over boundaries and limits of speech online. With a particular emphasis on the pandemic, Biden officials worked hand-in-glove with contacts at social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook to block both entire themes (including non-administration takes on “climate change, gender discussions, abortion and economic policy,” as well as Covid) and specific individuals. The judge said pressure went beyond aggressively encouraging the platforms to take down posts to coercion of some of the biggest social media companies by the “most powerful office in the world.” For example, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials held “weekly sync” meetings with Facebook and emailed them offending posts for takedown. The FBI’s San Francisco field office had eight agents responsible for forwarding concerns about social media posts to seven tech companies multiple times a month.

Biden officials subject to the injunction include White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, employees of the Justice Department and FBI, the State Department, the Centers for Disease Control, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Jen Easterly, who leads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy plus two more pages of lesser-known names. None of them may contact say Twitter and request a particular social media posting be taken down. They cannot talk to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” The judge’s order also bars government agencies from communicating with some outside groups, including the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, and the Stanford Internet Observatory, to promote the removal of protected speech online.

Under the guise of preventing “disinformation” but in reality in support of a unified government line, the government exercised prior restraint, a stroke against the First Amendment. Prior restraint was also in evidence in the shadow government efforts to block anti-administration news, such as the discovery of financial crimes on Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Covid lab-leak theories. “When, in the public forum, there is speech they disagree with and does not align with their political narratives,” Missouri’s attorney general, said, referring to administration officials, “they then collude with and coerce Big Tech’s social media to take that speech down.” In short, there was so much collusion between government and social media giants as to constitute active and ongoing censorship, and it was time to reassert the First Amendment rights of Americans to a market place of ideas, not just what the government wants to peddle.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” the Louisiana judge wrote in his full opinion in regards to an order creating the injunction. He concluded the plaintiffs, led by Missouri and Louisiana, were likely to succeed in suing the government and issued an injunction limiting administration officials from attempting to coordinate with social media giants to remove content until the matter can be formally settled. “If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the judge said.

For at least the time being, gone are the days a Robert Kennedy post questioning vaccinations could be taken down after a phone call from the CDC, or a Joe Rogan Facebook piece suggesting Covid was a lab leak out of China be deep-sixed or shadow banned by the FBI. The Biden administration has already appealed the injunction order. They warn the injunction could undermine national security efforts, since some “censorship” was established to respond to Russian actors sowing disinformation in the runup to the 2016 election. Yet almost all the targets of federal censorship during the Biden era have been Americans. The issue has Supreme Court written all over it.

Most of the censorship practiced imposed on conservative thinking. “This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech,” the judge wrote. “American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country… the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario.” The injunction specifically cites a Biden grandchild parody account that was quickly deleted after an email from the White House director of digital strategy to contacts at the old Twitter. The judge also pointed to efforts to suppress content from Robert Kennedy and Ted Cruz. We note at one point in the past my Twitter account along with those of Antiwar.com Scott Horton’s and Director of the Ron Paul Institute Daniel McAdams’ were suspended  on the same day, and only restored at about the same time under Twitter’s new management.

At the core of all this is a new term, disinformation, right out of George Orwell’s NewSpeak. Ostensibly referring to social or MSM content of dubious authenticity, the term has been further bastardized to basically mean anything contentious that one side disagrees with. The idea that the government can behind closed doors label some bit of info disinformation and demand it be taken down from social media is indeed censorship. It prevents offending ideas from reaching the public.

Over the past few years, coordination and communication between government officials and the companies increased as the federal government responded to rising election interference and voter suppression efforts after claims Russian actors sowed disinformation on social media sites during the 2016 election. Public health officials also frequently communicated with the companies during the coronavirus pandemic. Orders seem to come from the top. “They’re killing people,” Biden said in July 2021, after being asked about the presence of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and other sites.

Like so many things such as the all-consuming surveillance which affect our society, the idea of the government and social media working collaboratively to censor arose out of concerns over terrorism post-9/11, specifically that ISIS and others were using social media to recruit. Government agencies would point out offending posts and its proxies in social media would remove them. It all seemed for the good. However “the deep state planted a seed of suppression by government censorship, but that seed was fertilized, germinated and grew rapidly once President Biden took office,” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said in an interview.

It is unclear at exactly what point the government assumed editorial responsibility for “calling out false speech,” or what WaPo calls “coordination with social media.” It is unclear at what point the government felt it could climb astride the First Amendment to control what Americans read. It is unclear why social media companies would so casually hand over responsibility such that a phone call from a DOJ bureaucrat could secretly kill a line of inquiry or thought online.

There has been pushback from only one corner of social media. Elon Musk sought to make a similar case to the injunction regarding censorship with the release of internal messages detailing the debates that executives had before he took over Twitter last year. The messages he released, called the Twitter Files, offered a peek inside the company’s interaction with government and law enforcement to restrict prominent accounts. They included revelations about the internal debate at Twitter over blocking links to a New York Post article about Hunter Biden in 2020. The Files show employees (the Site Integrity Policy-Policy Escalation Support team) were tasked with suppressing the visibility of accounts or subjects deemed undesirable or dangerous, with and without government’s help, all in secret. Musk called Twitter “both a social media company and a crime scene.”

There was no stopping this censorship until now with this injunction and the litigation to follow. The ultimate outcome could help decide whether free speech and an open market of ideas has a future online, or, in the words of the NYT, “the First Amendment has become, for better or worse, a barrier to virtually any government efforts to stifle a problem.”

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Free Speech and Fair Play are a Bitch

July 14, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: 1A, 303 Creative v. Elenis, affirmative action, affirmative admissions, Bakke, First Amendment, Grutter, Harvard, University of North Carolina, West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette
Posted in: Democracy

If there were two lessons from the high school civics class most Americans seemed to skip that they should learn now they are: rights are for everyone and free speech sometimes protects speech you don’t like yourself. Luckily, the Supreme Court recently offered America a tutorial on both topics.

In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina the Court made the common sense ruling that discrimination of some colors of people is a poor way to fix discrimination of other colors of people. What woke mind could possibly conceive that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection under the law meant treating a large portion of the population grossly unfairly at the expense of another? Kind of a common-sense argument but one America needed to travel all the way to the Supreme Court to resolve.

Starting back with 1979’s Bakke and largely confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2003’s Grutter, America’s higher education institutions decided it was they who would fix systemic racism in America by offering preferential treatment by race, specifically, white and yellow colored students were considered less deserving of a good education at say Harvard, and had to sit out the Ivy League so that some black and brown kids could take their places. The word for this back in the day was not racism (which it was) but “affirmative action.” It would right wrongs. This “reverse discrimination” was allowed through some clever word play because its goal of a diverse student body was considered a “compelling state interest” that overshadowed other compelling interests, such as equal protection for all under the law. It was sanctioned by the Supreme Court of its day, but only as a temporary solution; Justice Sarah Day O’Conner in one of the key cases upholding affirmative action wrote, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

It didn’t seem to work, short or long term, in significantly changing society, if black and brown activists of 2023 are to be believed. Decades of pushing aside white and yellow kids (the former privileged because once upon a time other unrelated white people owned slaves and the latter just too damn hard working and smart) for black and brown did not seem significantly change society. There are of course individual examples, both fake (blacks or browns who would have succeeded in any system) and occasionally real, true by-their-bootstraps stories once they got that helping hand.

“When affirmative action was conceptualized, it was to right past wrongs,” one commenter said. “Then, it became sort of endless. It wasn’t just African Americans. It was Native Americans and Hispanics. And then it was women, LGBT, etc., and that wiped out the moral imperative of it a little, because diversity is not quite as strong a claim as correcting past wrongs.”

There were other problems. Letting someone into Harvard is not the same as him succeeding at Harvard. I learned that in high school too, by the way. If some program had sent me to an Ivy school at age 18 I would have failed miserably, coming out of a non-rigorous but nice enough Ohio high school where upon graduation I had neither read one classic book nor written one proper research paper. I think Harvard expects you to know that kind of thing and white as I am, I would have floundered. I’m sure they have some sort of remedial program for their unqualified students but it seems unlikely to make up for many years of half-hearted education before it. And that exposes another dirty little secret about why affirmative action failed; America is divided by class, not race (though the two overlap in a Venn diagram.)

America’s second recent high school civics lesson is you as an individual may not like everything other people use their freedom of speech to say and do; in fact, their deeply held beliefs may run 180 degrees from yours. Protip for exam time: this is the whole point of the First Amendment free speech clause and it was on display in another recent Supreme Court decision, 303 Creative v. Elenis.

The crux of the case is that one side, a web designer, wanted to know what would happen if she refused to produce a hypothetical celebratory wedding page for a gay couple, claiming her religion did not allow her to support same-sex marriage. The couple would have sued because of course they would, likely claiming as a protected class by sex in Colorado, the cake maker must be forced by the government to make the cake they wanted celebrating their nuptials. Lower courts had weighed in in favor, claiming various cake makers, florists, and web designers must be forced to practice their craft (i.e., their expression, their speech) to avoid LGBT discrimination. It was as if one side had more rights than they other and would have resulted in the government of the United States using the threat of arrest or fine to force the web designer to produce speech she was opposed to.

That’s a big no-no in a democracy, compelling speech.

Though the state can demand businesses provide goods and services to all customers in protected categories, it cannot demand individuals engage in speech proclaiming messages that they oppose, such as in web page design. In Justice Samuel Alito’s words, a win for the state of Colorado would mean some businesses that provide custom speech for customers could be forced to “espouse things they loathe.”

This all goes back to 1943’s West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette when during WWII the Supreme Court held West Virginia could not make Jehovah’s Witness students pledge allegiance to the American flag. The decision contained arguably the most famous finding in American First Amendment law: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” The key finding in 303 Creative is the designer is not denying a service on the basis of status of a protected class but instead refusing to engage in speech because she disagreed with its message (Masterpiece Cakeshop failed to yield a definitive ruling and is not relevant here.)

Despite all the hub-bub, the Court correctly applied the broader civics class way of thinking in 2023, focusing on the First Amendment speech clause, and said nothing directly about the more contentious and limited religious aspect of all this, and passed on 2023’s wokist definition of discrimination. Had the recent case involved a Jehovah’s Witness’ web page and not ostensibly something to do with gay rights, you would barely have heard of the matter even though the real significance would have been about the same.

It’s easy to forget most of what you heard in high school, especially in a one-off class like civics. But common sense can get you a long ways. It is easy to write off the Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions as discriminatory, with only a little thought that what it did away with — affirmative action — was discriminatory as heck. Same for 303 Creative v. Elenis, which is being promoted by the MSM as anti-LGBT thing when in fact it is an example of how robust our First Amendment is. At the Founding no one could have conceived of a free speech battle between a web designer and gay clients, but that is what the First Amendment expanded to take in. The Supreme Court has not gone rogue, and democracy is not in danger. These two recent cases prove if anything the system is flexible for the times and robust in defending the most basic freedoms a democracy is built upon.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Some Leftover Questions for Hunter Biden

July 10, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: Burisma, China, Devon Archer, Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, money laundering, tax fraud, ukraine
Posted in: Biden

About two years ago during a debate with Donald Trump, Joe Biden dismissed his son’s laptop emails as disinformation, maybe from Russia. After becoming president, Joe said his son Hunter was innocent, and most recently, even after Hunter pleaded guilty to tax evasion and weapons charges, said he was proud of his son. So in terms of leftover questions, let’s start with: which part are you proud of, Joe? The video evidence of his crack use? The video evidence of his cavorting with prostitutes? The tax evasion charges, or was it the weapons charge, where Hunter lied to obtain a handgun? Well, it is pride month after all…

Joking aside, the easy-sleazy plea deal Hunter accepted (which has him do no jail time in lieu of probation) leaves begging several important questions about exactly what Hunter (and Joe, and Jim, Joe’s brother) were doing in return for millions of dollars in consulting fees. Tax evasion seems just the beginning, but let’s get very specific. For the most part, unless noted with a URL, incidents below are drawn from Hunter’s email and laptop documents (we published a dive into the laptop’s contents online in December 2020, and a deeper dive in our print edition.)

The reason we have to ask all these sticky questions is because half of Americans — including a third of Democrats — think Hunter got favorable treatment from federal prosecutors after he agreed to a sweetheart plea deal.

So Hunter, you joined the Burisma board at a salary of $83,000 a month with no obvious work duties. What was your actual job at Burisma? We ask because on April 16, 2014, while Papa Joe was vice president, he met with your business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Joe travelled to Ukraine to lobby for increased fracking. Burisma was one of the few companies licensed to frack in Ukraine. Burisma made hundreds of millions of dollars from Ukraine’s new policy. Burisma paid more than $4,000,000 for your and Archer’s board memberships, including at least $1,450,000 wired directly to your accounts.

While you and Archer were serving on Burisma’s board, Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was investigating Burisma and its owner. In his official position as vice president, Biden demanded Ukraine fire Shokin, and threatened to withdraw $1 billion in U.S. military aid if it did not do so. Shokin was fired.

While serving on the Burisma board, you and Archer sought meetings with senior State Department officials, including then-Secretary of State John Kerry and then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. What did you guys chat about? The reason we ask is because whatever your job description read, your value to Burisma was your perceived access to the Executive Branch. Papa Joe was at least a passive participant in the scheme, maybe more than that.

Your laptop shows you, through a number of front companies, accepted money from foreign firms and moved that money to the U.S. where it was parceled out to other entities, including Joe’s brother Jim. Some of it then went back to foreign hands. It all smells bad — multi-million dollar transfers to LLCs without employees, residences used as business addresses, legal tricks from Cyprus to the British Virgin Islands. Can you explain why your fees traveled such circuitous routes? What did you pay Brother Jim for, and why did he appear to kickback some of the money you paid him?

What is this money al about, Hunter? in 2014, you received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia and the widow of Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow. Baturina became Russia’s only female billionaire when her company received a series of Moscow municipal contracts while her husband was mayor.

But let’s move on to China, Russia and Ukraine are so depressing. The majority of the contents of your laptop are a jumbled record of your international business ventures. Outstanding in the haystack are a large number of wire transfers to and from your clients (but no evidence of what “work” you performed for those clients. Hmm.) Those with traceable addresses appear to be mostly anonymous shell companies run out of lawyers’ offices, with no employees and fuzzy public paper trails. One typical one involved $259,845 traveling on April 2, 2018 from your Hudson West III in New York to a numbered bank account held by Cathay Bank in Asia. Hudson West was created by Hunter Biden’s own law firm, Owasco, with several Chinese nationals, including a Jianming Ye associate, Gong Wendong. Ye Jianming is chairman of CEFC China Energy, who reportedly had close ties to both the Chinese government and the PLA. He’s been arrested in China on corruption charges.

Hunter, in August 2018 you also returned $100k back to CEFC in China via its own New York subsidiary LLC, Hudson West V, whose listed address was on Foxwood Road, in New York state. That address is not a business office but instead a single family home worth over $5 million. It looks like the place has new owners, but phone records suggest two people lived there when you were in business, including Gong Wendong. Money appeared to move from physical China to virtual Hunter back to virtual China in the U.S., starting and ending in accounts tied to Gong Wendong after touching base with Hunter, a potential indicator of laundering. Chinese money in China changed into Chinese money in America. Caution is needed; while what looks like American money laundering at first glance may indeed be so, or could be designed to hide the cash from the Chinese government while staying inside American law, a quasi-illegal service you possibly supplied. Is that what you were really up to, fee-for-service to the Chinese? Enquiring minds and all that, you know.

The Foxwood address also appears on millions of dollars worth of bank transfers among Cathay Bank, CEFC, and multiple semi-anonymous LLCs and hedge funds. One single transfer alone to Hudson West III on August 8, 2017 represented the movement of $5 million from Northern Capital International, which appears to be a Chinese government-owned import-export front company. What was that all about?

In addition, the house on Foxwood was the mailing address for a secured VISA card in the name of your company, Hudson West III. The card is funded by someone unnamed through Cathay Bank for $99,000 and guaranteed by someone’s checking account held by Cathay worth $450,000. Shared users of the card are you, Hunter, and Gong Wendong. The card was opened as CEFC secured a stake in a Russian state-owned energy company. Biden and others subsequently used the credit card to purchase extravagant items, including airline tickets and things at Apple stores, pharmacies, hotels, and restaurants. A Senate report characterized these transactions as “potential financial criminal activity.” Putting money on a secured VISA card in lieu of a direct wire transfer may be seen by some as an attempt to obscure the source of the money and thus allow you not to claim it as income but you didn’t do that, did you Hunter?

Jim Biden, Joe’s brother, was also an authorized user of the credit card. Jim over the years has been a nightclub owner, insurance broker, political consultant, and investor. When he ran into financial trouble having triple mortgaged his home, he was bailed out via loans from Joe and you, Hunter, and by a series of Joe’s donors. Jim also received a loan of $500k from John Hynansky, a Ukrainian-American businessman and longtime donor to Joe Biden’s campaigns. This all was in 2015, at the same time the then-vice president oversaw U.S. policy toward the country. As a senator, Joe Biden made use of a private jet owned by Hynansky’s son.

That will leave undigested the bigger tale of President Joe Biden, who ran in part on an anti-corruption platform following the Trump family escapades. While Joe Biden says he regrets meeting with the Burisma official, he did indeed take the meeting as VP. It’s always easier to apologize when caught than seek permission in advance in Joe’s world. Is that what your dad always says, Hunter?

A 2017 email chain involving Hunter brokering an ultimately failed deal for a new venture with old friend CEFC, the Chinese energy company, described a 10 percent set-aside for the “big guy,” whom former Hunter Biden partner Tony Bobulinski publicly identified as Joe Biden. Joe also took Hunter to China with him in December 2013 on Air Force 2, and met with Chinese leaders while Hunter tried to make deals on his own. It was Joe’s donors and pals who bailed out brother Jim over the years with sweetheart loans.

There is a lot more but you get the picture. A lot of appearance of improprietous malarkey from a senior statesman like your dad who should have known better. In places like China and the Ukraine, where corruption is endemic, it is assumed the sons of powerful men have access to their father. You traded on those assumptions for millions of dollars, and Papa Joe stood by understanding what was happening. Every father wants to help his son, and we can imagine you  went to his dad time after time, pleading for just one more little favor to get you past your sordid past.

Joe Biden said of Hunter, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” So Hunter, help us out. Explain.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Mens Re and Donald Trump

June 30, 2023 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Democracy, Trump

A very important point of law — mens rea — may decide how the Trump Mar-a-Lago documents case plays out, perhaps even deciding his innocence or guilt.

Section 793(e) (“The Espionage Act”) requires the government to prove that Trump knew he had National Defense Information (NDI) in those boxes at Mar-a-Lago, that Trump knew there was a government official entitled to receive the information, and also that Trump then willfully failed to deliver it to that official. That’s the standard the government has to prove in order to convict Trump, and it requires understanding what he thought at the time he kept the documents. None of this speaks to the charges of obstruction directly, except to say it will be hard to prove obstruction to a jury when there was no underlying crime.

Mens Rea is Latin, and refers to criminal intent. The literal translation is “guilty mind.” It​ refers to the state of mind statutorily required in order to convict a particular defendant of a particular crime. Mens rea goes to intent, your mind, your brain, when an action occurred. For example, in criminal cases the majority of crimes require intent; the prosecutor must prove that the person willfully intended to do that which he did. For example, if you punched someone in the face and you intended to do that, that’s a crime, as opposed to hitting him by accident, for example, or truly believing the action was legal and not a crime, such as in self-defense.

In Trump’s case, things are not as simple as the CNN version of events, i.e., Classified in the ugly shower room = Conviction for the Orange Man. In order to convict, the documents, classified or not, are simply a starting point. Special Prosecutor Jack Smith will need to prove Trump knew what he was doing, and did not believe what he was doing was lawful. For example, under the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (PRA) the president designates all records he creates either as Presidential or Personal Records. A former president is supposed to turn over his Presidential Records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and he has the right to keep his Presidential or Personal Records as defined by the law (there are exceptions, such as for national security information), usually for his library. It is unclear Trump’s choices follow the letter of the Act.

Trump can however claim he fully believed (even if wrongly) the boxes of material, most of which was not classified and included newspaper clippings and notes from other world leaders, are his Personal Records under the PRA. If so, did he knowingly retain NDI? Did he really think those documents “could be used to the injury of the United States” as the Espionage Act requires or did he just think of them as mementos of his time in office, his Personal Records of the four years? If he thought these boxes were his Personal Records, he may have believed that NARA simply had no right to receive them at all.

We know what Trump is likely to say about such matters at his trial. Can the special prosecutor prove different? He seems to have three avenues via which to do this, two of which are potentially weak.

What may be the strongest view of Trump’s mens rea at one point in this saga are audio tapes of him. The indictment suggests there is a tape recording of one of at least two instances where Trump showed off the documents to people without security clearances. On the tape, recorded according to the indictment with his knowledge and consent, Trump admits the document at hand is classified, and in a schoolboy-like way says he should not be showing it to a writer, a publisher, and two Trump staffers. All that could be seen as a confession of sorts that what he held was NDI, not something personal. A lot depends on that tape, its admissibility in court, and whether a Florida jury ultimately believes it literally and not as just another episode of Trump bragging.

A second possible source of mens rea which might help convict Trump are compelled statements made by his own lawyer, Evan Corcoran, in front of the grand jury and via written notes in contrivance of standard attorney-client privilege which would otherwise shield those remarks. What might the lawyer have said and how could he have violated attorney-client privilege and still have the material appear admissible in court?

The indictment claims Trump instructed his lawyers to claim falsely he did not have the documents DOJ subpoenaed, and suggesting his lawyers destroy some of the documents (“pluck it out”), or just “not play ball.” Trump allegedly spoke positively of Hillary Clinton’s legal team, which deleted tens of thousands of emails while supposedly not informing her to keep her clean. A jury might find Trump’s actions alone speak to intent, his active attempts to hide physical boxes of documents from investigators, and treat the lawyer’s statements as confirmation.

Attorney-client privilege is recognized as one of the cornerstones of fairness in our system. In the Trump case, the Justice Department used the one major exception to privilege, when the communication is intended to further a criminal or fraudulent act (the “predicate crime”), to compel Trump’s lawyer to give evidence against their own client. Justice asserted Trump lied to his own team about having no more classified documents, and that this constituted a crime of fraud and maybe obstruction, and thus privilege is not available and Trump’s lawyer can be made to testify against his client. The crime or fraud exception to attorney-client privilege itself has a long history, dating back to English common law. In the United States, the crime or fraud exception was first recognized by the Supreme Court in the 1840 case of United States v. Privileged Communications. Trump’s defense team will no doubt work hard to have the lawyer statements declared inadmissible, claiming without a clear finding on obstruction no crime was actually committed at that time by Trump.

The last avenue available to the prosecution to show Trump’s mens rea has some dandy complications flowering around it, and could help unravel the case to Trump’s advantage. Alongside Trump is his valet/aide, Waltine Nauta, who is charged in parallel with Trump under the Espionage Act when any rendering of reality shows Nauta simply was moving boxes around the bowels of Mar-a-Lago at his boss’ request. That’s a long way from a crime, even considering the legal looseness of the Espionage Act. But the point in charging Nauta is not to seek to convict him; the point is to get him to accept a plea or even an immunity deal to tell everyone exactly what Trump was thinking at multiple critical points in the saga. As Trump’s closest non-blood related aide, Nauta’s testimony would be compelling to a jury. If it shows Trump knowing he had done wrong keeping the documents, and that Trump actively used Nauta to try and physically hide them, that would be a pretty much slam dunk case against the former president.

The problem, besides the unknown loyalty Nauta may harbor towards Trump, is it appears DOJ leaned too hard on Nauta’s own lawyer, in an attempt to get him to persuade his client to turn state’s evidence in favor of the prosecution. Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward, alleged in a court filing that during a meeting with prosecutors about his client’s case back in November, the head of the Counterintelligence Section of DOJ’s National Security Division Jay Bratt “suggested Woodward’s judicial application [for a DC Superior Court judgeship] might be considered more favorably if he and his client cooperated against Trump.” Bratt allegedly remarked that he did not think that Woodward was a “Trump guy” and that “he would do the right thing.”

Assuming this is not simply made up (Woodward has a golden DC resume to stand behind, including a decade at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, headquartered in Washington. It is the second-largest lobbying firm in the United States and is consistently ranked among the top law firms in the U.S.) this level of misconduct against a senior DOJ official could sink the Trump case, at the very least removing Nauta from the Trump trial as his case is thrown out of court. Woodward’s a poor candidate for accusation he made the whole thing up.

So, what was Trump thinking? Answer that and you’re a long way toward knowing the resolution of the Mar-a-Lago case.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Leave Trump Alone (Because It Does not Matter)

June 23, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: 2024, attorney-client privilege, Indictment, Jean Carroll, Russiagate, Stormy
Posted in: Biden, Democracy, Trump

The narrative is set. Everything between now and November 2024, absent an actual alien intervention, is filler material.

Trump will ride his narrative to the polls, campaigning even if in hand cuffs and an ankle monitor. He is, he will make clear, the victim of a Democratic plot to weaponize “justice,” dating back to 2016 when Hillary was let off scot-free for her email shenanigans, followed by the FBI’s concocted Russiagate, two impeachments, and now a carousel of indictments. His opponent is Joe Biden, older than Yoda but presenting more like Jar Jar, crooked in cahoots with his scum bag son to hard suck bribe money out of eastern Europe. Sleepy Joe’s narrative is to count on the same FBI going after Trump with both barrels to shuffle its feet investigating him and Hunter through the election, with a final surge under the slogan “Oh who cares, I’m not Trump!” to wrap things up. It’s all a rich tapestry.

The problem is it is compelling; there is a lot of truth underneath the showmanship. There was David Petraeus, Obama’s CIA Director, who leaked secret docs to his girlfriend, and Sandy Berger, Clinton’s NSA Director, who stole secret docs. But it was Hillary who did get away with it all, at the FBI’s discretion (so much for one law for everyone) what Trump has been accused of in Mar-a-Lago. Hillary Clinton maintained an unsecured private email server which processed classified material on a daily basis. Her server held at least 110 known messages containing classified information, including e-mail chains classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level, the highest level of civilian classification. The FBI found classified intelligence improperly stored and transmitted on Clinton’s server “was compromised by unauthorized individuals, to include foreign governments or intelligence services, via cyber intrusion or other means.”

Clinton and her team destroyed tens of thousands of emails, evidence, as well as physical phones and Blackberries which potentially held evidence — obstruction as clear as it comes. She operated the server out of her home kitchen despite the presence of the Secret Service on property who failed to report it. A server in a closet is not as dramatic a visual as boxes of classified stored in a shower room, but justice is supposed to be blind. More recently, what of Mike Pence and Joe Biden, both of whom have escaped indictment so far on similar charges of mishandling classified information. Trump voters know if the FBI is going to take a similar fact sets and ignore one while aggressively pursuing another, it is partial and political. No matter which candidate wins and loses, DOJ’s credibility is tanked.

The Stormy Daniels case, and the guilty finding in the Jean Carroll defamation case, reek of politics. Neither case would have seen daylight outside of Democratic hive New York, and neither could have held up outside a partisan justice system that permits it to ignore Jeffrey Epstein’s death in custody or a city in a crime tornado (New York in the past year reduced 52 percent of all felony charges to misdemeanors, opposite of what was done to Trump) while aggressively allowing the system to pursue a decades-old rape case of dubious propriety.

Witch hunt meet Hunter. New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg ran for office on the promise to prosecute Trump. He fulfilled a campaign promise and paid off his George Soros-connected backers. Bragg, in the words of law professor Jonathan Turley, had a “very public, almost Hamlet-like process where he debated whether he could do this bootstrapping theory [bumping misdemeanors up to felonies in the Stormy case.] He stopped it for a while and was pressured to go forward with it. All of that smacks more of politics than prosecutorial discretion.”

Calling it all a witch hunt is just a starting point. The point here is not innocence; it is whether the justice system is going to take fact sets and ignore one while aggressively pursuing another, risking being seen as partial and political. No matter which candidate wins or loses, credibility is tanked.

Still to come (at the least) are whatever judicial actions will emerge from the Special Prosecutor over Trump’s role in January 6, and legal action over the 2020 Georgia vote count (with another Democratic openly anti-Trump prosecutor.) Trump jokes in his stump speech nowadays every time he flies over a Blue State he gets another subpoena. He could easily head into the Republican convention to accept the nomination with multiple convictions and/or indictments on his shoulders. It won’t matter. The justice system is going to take fact sets and ignore some while aggressively pursuing others, partial and political plain as day. No matter which candidate wins, credibility is tanked. It grinds that most of the serious charges against Trump are under the hoary Espionage Act, seen by many as reviving the now-discredited trope Trump was a Russian agent.

Mostly overlooked for now is how much of the apparent evidence against Trump at Mar-a-Lago came from his own attorneys. Attorney-client privilege is recognized as one of the cornerstones of fairness in our system. In the Trump case, the Justice Department used the one major exception to privilege, when the communication is intended to further a criminal or fraudulent act, to compel Trump’s lawyers to give evidence against their own client. Justice asserted Trump lied to his own team about having no more classified documents, and that this constituted a crime of fraud and maybe obstruction, and thus privilege is not available and Trump’s lawyer can be made to testify against his client. The crime or fraud exception to attorney-client privilege itself has a long history, dating back to English common law. In the United States, the crime or fraud exception was first recognized by the Supreme Court in the 1840 case of United States v. Privileged Communications. But Trump’s supporters are unlikely to read deeply into the case law; all they’ll see is what looks like strong-arm tactics by the Department of Justice. No matter which candidate wins and loses, DOJ’s credibility is tanked.

The thing is no one has to work very hard to convince Trump supporters of the truth of what he is saying, that he is the victim. Trump support remained unmoved by the many investigations that plagued his presidency. Even during peak crises, views of him were static. Post-presidency polls continued the trend. Public opinion of Trump remains remarkably stable, despite his unprecedented legal challenges, and about half of Americans do not see his behavior as disqualifying, sharper if you divide along partisan lines. When asked if Trump’s legal troubles would impact their views of him, two-thirds of his supporters said it would not make a difference. That’s a committed bunch. Perhaps just as important, 57 percent of voters, including one-third of Democrats, said the indictment in New York earlier this year was politically motivated.

No one can say who will win in November 2024, but one loser is certain, faith in the rule of law by a large number of Americans. They will leave the polls certain the system was bent to “get” Trump, either saddened by the fall of blind justice or saddened that it did not work and Trump remined a powerful figure with a large movement behind him, either in or out of the Oval Office.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

A War Like No Other in Ukraine

June 17, 2023 // 0 Comments

Posted in: Biden

Joe Biden created for the U.S. a war like no other, one where others die and the U.S. simply sits back and pays the bills on a gargantuan scale. No attempts are made at diplomacy by the Americans, and the diplomatic efforts of others like the Chinese are dismissed as evil attempts to gain influence in the area (similar for Chinese diplomatic work in the Yemen war.) Biden is coming close to achieving 1984‘s goal of perpetual warfare while only putting a handful of American lives at risk. He has learned lessons from the Cold War, and already put them into play. Can we call it the Biden Doctrine yet?

Biden’s strategy is clear enough now after well more than a year of conflict; what he has been sending to Ukraine jumped from helmets and uniforms to F-16s in only 15 months and shows no signs of stopping. The problem is U.S. weapons are never enough for victory and always “just enough” to allow the battle to go on until then next round. If the Ukrainians think they are playing the U.S. for suckers for free arms they best check who is really paying for everything, in blood.

Putin is playing this game himself in a way, careful not to introduce anything too powerful, such as strategic bombers, and upset the balance and offer Biden the chance to intervene in the war directly (one can hear old man Biden on TV now, explaining American airstrikes are needed to prevent a genocide, the go-to excuse he learned at Obama’s knee.) That’s what the current escalation holds, airpower. Ukraine will find even with the promise of the F-16 it can’t acquire aircraft and train up pilots fast enough (minimum training time is 18-24 months), and next will be begging the U.S. to serve as its air force. As it is the planes are likely to be based out of Poland and Romania, suggesting NATO will pick up the high-skilled tasks of maintaining and repairing them. Left unclear is the NATO role in required aerial refueling to keep the planes over the battlefield. F-16s aside, a spin off bonus to all these weapons gifts is that the vast majority of transfers to date have been “presidential drawdowns.” This means the U.S. sends used or older weapons to Ukraine, after which the Pentagon can use the Congressionally-authorized funds to replenish their stocks by purchasing new arms. The irony that war machines once in Iraq are now on the ground in Ukraine can’t be missed.

The U.S. strategy seems based on creating a ghastly tie of sorts, two sides lined up across a field shooting at each other until one side called it quits for the day. Same as in 1865, same as in 1914, but the new factor is today those armies face off across those fields with 21st-century HIMARS artillery, machine guns, and other tools of killing far more effective than a musket. It is unsustainable, literally chewing up men, albeit not Americans. The question meanwhile of how many more Ukrainians have to die is answered privately by Joe Biden as “potentially all of them.” Anything else requires you to cynically believe Biden thinks he can simply purchase victory,

Up until now this has all been the Cold War playbook. Fighting to the last Afghan was a strategy perfected in Soviet-held Afghanistan in the 1980s. Yet what is different is the scale — since Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States sent over $37 billion worth of military aid to support Kiev’s war effort, the single largest arms transfer in U.S. history and one with no signs of stopping. A single F-16 costs up to $350 million a copy if bought with weapons, maintenance equipment, and spare parts kits.

Yet despite the similarities to Cold War Strategy 101, some lessons have been learned over the intervening years. One of America’s fail-points throughout the Cold War and the War on Terror was the use of puppet governments largely imposed or direly supported by American money and muscle. Because these governments lacked the support of the people (see Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan) they were non-starters with the lifespan of fruit flies. Ukraine is different; the puppet government is the government, beholden to the U.S. for its very survival but more or less supported directly by the people for now.

The other lesson learned has to do with nation building, or rebuilding or reconstruction, whatever the vast post-war expenditures will be called in this conflict. No more straight-up governmental efforts as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This time it will be all private enterprise. “It is obvious that American business can become the locomotive that will once again push forward global economic growth,” President Zelensky said, boasting that BlackRock, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, and others “have already become part of our Ukrainian way.”

The NYT calls Ukraine “the world’s largest construction site” and predicts projects there in the multi-billions, as high in some estimates as $750 billion. It will be, says the Times, a “gold rush: the reconstruction of Ukraine once the war is over. Russia is stepping up its offensive heading into the second year of the war, but already the staggering rebuilding task is evident. Hundreds of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals and factories have been obliterated along with critical energy facilities and miles of roads, rail tracks and seaports. The profound human tragedy is unavoidably also a huge economic opportunity.” Earlier this year JP Morgan and Zelensky signed a memorandum of understanding stipulating Morgan would assist Ukraine in its reconstruction.

And maybe those large American companies have learned the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the billions spent, much money was wasted on dead ends and much was siphoned off due to corruption. But success or failure, the contractors always got paid in our Wars of Terror. With that in mind, more than 300 companies from 22 countries signed up for a Rebuild Ukraine exhibition and conference in Warsaw. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a standing-room-only crowd packed Ukraine House to discuss investment opportunities.

The eventual gold rush in rebuilding makes for an interesting addendum to the Biden strategy of fighting to the last Ukrainian. The more that is destroyed the more that needs to be rebuilt, and the potential for more money to pour into U.S. companies smart enough to wait by the trough for the killing to subside. But why wait? Drones operated by Danish companies have already mapped every bombed-out structure in the Mykolaiv Oblast region, with an eye toward using the data to help decide what reconstruction contracts should be issued.

So let’s put some lipstick on this pig of a strategy and call it the Biden Doctrine. Part I is to limit direct U.S. combat involvement while fanning the flames for others. Part II is to provide massive amounts of arms to enable a fight to the last local person. Part III is to transform the home government into a puppet instead of creating an unpopular one afresh. Part IV is to turn the reconstruction process into a profit center for American companies. How long the war lasts and how many die are cynically not part of the strategy. The off ramp in Ukraine, a diplomatic outcome that resets the map to pre-invasion 2022 levels, is clear enough to Washington. The Biden administration seems content, shamefully, not to call forcefully for diplomatic efforts but instead to bleed out the Russians as if this was Afghanistan 1980, albeit in the heart of Europe.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Indictments over Classified. Not Biden, and Not Pence. So Why Trump?

June 12, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: Christina Robb, Espionage Act, Indictment, Mar-a-Lago, Waltine Nauta
Posted in: Biden, Democracy, Trump

Donald Trump is the first president in history to be indicted for Federal crimes, in this case a series of eight charges each with multiple counts totaling 37 centering on his taking highly classified materials with him to Mar-a-Lago from the White House in January 2021. The charges also implicate Trump and a close aide, Waltine Nauta, in a conspiracy to hide the documents in whole or in part from the National Archives (NARA), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and his own legal team, and making false statements along those same lines.

Hundreds of documents are of concern, classified at the highest levels with origins at CIA, NSA, and elsewhere in the intelligence community. While leaks and speculation prior to the unsealing of the indictment suggested this was a routine Espionage Act case, i.e., you have possession of some classified documents and thus must be guilty, the indictment lays out a damming parallel set of evidence for obstruction, including a suggestion that Trump was prepared to have his lawyers shred some of the offending documents.

Though Biden’s handling of classified remains an active investigation, Mike Pence was recently absolved of any criminal intent in his own mishandling of secret paper. Many people believe the same result will come of the Biden case. What makes Trump’s case so materially different that the Special Prosecutor is prepared to throw the book at him and his aide?

The key seems to be the egregiousness of Trump’s actions coupled with his attempt to cover up his actions. Lawyers call it an “aggravating factor,” making clear the charged actions were not accidental. It looks like they may have it.

The indictment shows in great detail efforts Trump made to conceal the documents both from NARA and the DOJ, and from members of his own legal team. Dozens of boxes containing mementos and paperwork from his administration were assembled by Trump over his four years in the White House. These included, all mixed together, everything from newspaper clippings to notes from Kim Jong Un to highly secretive war plans aimed at Iran. These boxes were transported to Mar-a-Lago by commercial means, itself a violation of numerous security regulations. Within Mar-a-Lago the documents were not always kept under lock and key, at one point being piled on the stage in one of the ballrooms (a photo of this is included with the indictment; another included photo shows boxes spilling classified documents onto the floor of a storage room, and a third showing the boxes in a shower room.) There is evidence to suggest Trump instructed his staff to better hide some of the documents from his own lawyers when they undertook a search in response to a NARA subpoena, and then again ahead of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. This may have led to Trump losing two lawyers just hours after being indicted, as Jim Trusty and John Rowley announced they’d resigned.

Further under the heading of egregiousness, the indictment suggests a tape recording exists of one of at least two instances where Trump showed off the documents to people without security clearances. In the tape Trump admits the document at hand is classified, and in a schoolboy-like way says he should not be showing it to a writer, a publisher, and two Trump staffers. Trump acknowledging that he knew a document in his possession was still classified stands at odds with his public claims that he had declassified all the materials he took and likely removes this defense strategy from the upcoming trial.

The indictment further claims Trump obstructed the investigation into his handling of classified materials in a number of ways, to include telling his attorneys to claim he did not have the documents subpoenaed, directing his aide Nauta to move boxes to conceal them from his own lawyers, and then from the FBI/DOJ and then from the grand jury, suggesting his lawyer destroy some of the documents, claiming he was cooperating fully when he was actively concealing documents from disclosure, and submitting a false certification that all requested document had been submitted. Nauta is listed as a co-conspirator on most of those allegations, with phone records and internal surveillance tapes connecting statements made and actions taken by the two men.

Trump also appears to have used the boxes moving like a shell game to hide information from Christina Bobb, who was serving as the formal custodian of records. The indictment makes clear she did not know the statements in her attestation that everything had been turned over to the DOJ were false, and she has not been charged.

The indictment also claims Trump helped to pack boxes at the White House, which rebuts a common defense in these sorts of cases, that the retention of documents was a clerical error by staff and not intentional.

While understanding the contents of the indictment give only one side of the story and that Trump will defend himself when the case comes to trial likely in the spring, the evidence available seems significant. Trump clearly possessed classified documents outside proper storage areas, and “injury to the United States,” a requirement of the law, should be fairly easy to prove given the dramatic nature of some of the documents and the casual manner in which Trump handled them, to include showing off war plans to a writer and publisher. This part of the case follows standard lines in an Espionage Act prosecution. Trump’s actions appear to go well beyond anything Mike Pence did with his classified or anything that Biden has so far been accused of.

However, it is the charges of obstruction which are most significant in this case. One of the key elements of obstruction is proving a state of guilty mind — mens rea — and that will be the crux of the actual prosecution based on the Mar-a-Lago documents. What was Trump thinking at the time, in other words, did he have specific intent to obstruct some investigation? A jury might find Trump’s actions alone speak to intent, his active attempts to hide physical boxes of documents from first his lawyers and then investigators, for example.

But the joker in the deck is Waltine Nauta, Trump’s close aide who is charged alongside Trump on the obstruction and lying allegations. Nauta faces potentially decades in jail, serious time. It appears his being charged may be an attempt to get him to testify directly to Trump’s intent and state of mind, by recalling actual instructions and conversations. If Nauta accepts some sort of plea deal in return for such testimony, it is hard to see a jury letting Donald Trump off on these charges. But where things go after that, politics-wise, is anybody’s guess at this early stage.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Academic Racism By a Different Name

June 9, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: affirmative action, Bakke, Grutter, Harvard, racially neutral, Students for Fair Admissions, Thomas Jefferson, TJ
Posted in: Democracy

A decision by the Supreme Court in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina/Harvard College is due very soon. It is widely held the decision will do away with or greatly weaken affirmative action in college admissions, removing or dramatically limiting race as a criterion. But far from helping solve the festering problem of race in America, the Supreme Court decision will simply shift the battle from affirmative action to so-called “race-neutral criteria.” This is an already-in-place end run around any end to affirmative action, designed to pretend criteria such as class rank or home zip code are not racial. The theory of racial neutrality in academic decision making holds the use of such “neutral” criteria to create racially balanced classrooms is proper where affirmative action was once called into play to do the same.

At present schools may use race as an admissions criterion as long as it is not the only basis for a decision, with the implied so long as the goal is diversity (good) and not whitewashing (bad). This allowed a nation pretending to strive toward equality to instead enact the opposite, by upholding separate standards based on skin color.

The hypocrisy began with Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a 1978 Supreme Court case which held a university violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if it made admissions decisions on the “definite and exclusive basis” of race. That bit about “definite and exclusive basis” was crucial—race could be a criteria, but just not the only one.

The Court ruled that a university’s use of racial “quotas” in its admissions process was unconstitutional, but a school’s use of affirmative action to accept more minority applicants was constitutional. In this case, the university’s offense was being too clear; the University of California explicitly held 16 out of 100 admission spots exclusively for black students instead of just putting its thumb on the scale elsewhere in the process and—presto!—filling those slots with black students.

In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) the Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions policy, which used racial preference (bad) to promote diversity (good.) Black applicants were admitted under different standards than members of every other group. The fudge was again to say that affirmative action is constitutional so long as it treats race as one factor among many, and does not substitute for individualized review of the applicants. But Grutter in 2003 came with an interesting addendum: affirmative action was supposed to be a temporary policy, an imperfect expedient, while society worked out the larger issues. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest in student body diversity.” Some two decades later with that imperfect expedient likely to be declared unconstitutional, what comes next?

Though the expected Supreme Court decision will focus on university admission, the next battleground will likely be a high school in Northern Virginia. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known to everyone as “T.J.” is considered one of the best STEM high schools in the country. Until about a year ago, the only way to get in was to pass a very competitive entrance exam. Entry into T.J. meant you were a smart kid with the discipline to put in hard hours with no guarantee of success, a perfect definition of those who would also go on to succeed at MIT, CalTech, or an Ivy. However, in the aftermath of George Floyd, this was somehow not enough. As many as 73 percent of students admitted to Thomas Jefferson High School were Asian. Only about two percent of T.J. students were black. T.J.’s school’s principal said “Our 32 Black students and 47 Hispanic students fill three classrooms. If our demographics actually represented those of the county’s public schools, we would enroll 180 Black and 460 Hispanic students, filling nearly 22 classrooms.”

The answer was T.J.’s entrance exam was replaced with “a holistic review” that included “experience factors, including students who are economically disadvantaged, English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools.”

In addition, spots for the top students from every public middle school in the area (several of which are predominantly black or Hispanic) were set aside, pushing more black and other non-white and non-Asian students into T.J. Ignored of course is that the term “Asian” itself is yet another racial fudge, that somehow Chinese, Thais, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Laotians, Indians, Bangladeshis, et al., are part of one omnibus racial rejection pile.

It worked, for T.J.: the percentage of Asian American students dropped from 73 percent to 54 percent. The percentage of black students grew from two to seven percent while the percentage of Hispanic students grew to 11 percent from three.

Despite the obvious racially-divided results, and perhaps cleverly anticipating the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision doing away with affirmative action, T.J. is drawing the next line in the sand, claiming its criteria are racially neutral, and emphasizing the fact that admissions officers at the school are not told the race, sex or name of any applicant. Harvard is also toying with the idea of such racially neutral criteria, judging applicants in part now based on likability, courage, and kindness.

So who is kidding who here? In the face of the end of affirmative action, is racially neutral criteria just another workaround to allow schools to patch together a student body racially diverse enough to satisfy 2023’s woke standards?

Though it is uncertain the coming affirmative action decision will address racial neutrality, the courts are indeed aware of the issue. After the Supreme Court passed on the T.J. case last year (in the context of an application for emergency relief) and remanded it to a lower court, a divided three-judge panel at the Fourth Circuit federal appeals court in May allowed T.J. to continue with its revised admissions policy. But in a dissent that seemed to be addressed to a Supreme Court of some future date, Trump-appointee Judge Allison J. Rushing wrote the majority had refused “to look past [T.J.’s] policy’s neutral varnish” and consider instead “an undisputed racial motivation and an undeniable racial result,” and that the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection “would be hollow if governments could intentionally achieve discriminatory ends under cover of neutral means.”

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Never Again? DeSantis and Torture

June 2, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: DeSantis, forced feeding, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Torture
Posted in: Other Ideas, Post-Constitution America

During a press conference at the Museum of Tolerance in West Jerusalem in April, Ron DeSantis was questioned about a former detainee’s claim that as a naval attorney at Guantanamo DeSantis watched as the prisoner was force fed, something the UN regards as torture. “Do you honestly believe that’s credible? It’s 2006, I’m a junior officer, do you honestly think that they would’ve remembered me?” DeSantis responded angrily.

Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni citizen, was held at Guantanamo Bay for 14 years, and has told news outlets that DeSantis witnessed him being force fed during a hunger strike in 2006. Adayfi in an op-ed for Al Jazeera said “As I tried to break free, I noticed DeSantis’ handsome face among the crowd at the other side of the chain link. He was watching me struggle. He was smiling and laughing with other officers as I screamed in pain.” Two former detainees, as well as defense lawyers and base officials, have told The Washington Post DeSantis had a “close up views” of disturbing incidents at the camp during his time there.

What might DeSantis have seen? In addition to Adayfi’s account, we have Imad Abdullah Hassan’s more detailed rendition, from a man who spent twelve years in Guantanamo in a cage without ever being charged with anything. A judge cleared Hassan for release, finding there was not enough incriminating evidence to justify keeping him imprisoned (779 men were held at Guantanamo since it opened in 2002, with 12 ever charged with crimes. Only two have been convicted.) Hassan’s clearance came, yet he remained at America’s off-shore penal colony without explanation or hope of release. He went on a hunger strike in 2009 in protest (the U.S. military refers to it as a “long-term non-religious fast”), and was force-fed.

Hassan unsuccessfully sued the president of the United States, claiming the conditions under which he is being force-fed at Guantanamo are torture. The lawsuit Hassan filed describes his treatment. His description matches Adayfi’s on key details. See if you’d remember things like this:

Prisoners are strapped to a hospital bed or special restraint chair for feeding.

A funnel or bag was used to channel large amounts of liquid into the tube to feed him faster. So much liquid was forced through that the second time Hassan underwent this procedure, he lost consciousness and spent two days in critical condition.

Prisoners were simultaneously force-fed laxatives causing them to defecate on themselves as they sat in the chair being fed. “People with hemorrhoids would leave blood on the chair and the linens would not always be changed before the next feeding,” said Hassan in the lawsuit. Prisoners would be be strapped down on top of others’ stool and blood for up to two hours at a time.

Hassan was at times forcibly sedated so he could be force-fed more easily. If Hassan vomited on himself at any time during the procedure, the force-feeding would restart from the beginning.

Air-conditioning was sometimes turned up and detainees were deprived of a blanket. This was particularly difficult for the hunger strikers, as they felt the cold more than someone who was eating.

Guards would bang hunger-striking prisoners’ cells every five minutes day and night to prevent sleep. Another detainee reported when he was brought back to his cell, the guards laid him on his stomach and cause him to vomit by pressing forcefully on his back.

It was all something a young naval officer would not easily forget seeing.

But bringing up the possibility that a young Ron DeSantis witnessed some of this is disingenuous. Whether DeSantis was present or not is only of interest given his likelihood of running for president. But if he was not present, he would have heard about the torture while at Gitmo, and issued legal opinions in line with it. But whether or not DeSantis wrote such opinions is of little consequence, given the number of military and civilian personnel who certainly not only witnessed torture but performed it. Their numbers stand shallow next to their bosses who created the torture regimes, legalized them, and promulgated them, men like Bush, Obama, Cheney, and Biden. If DeSantis supported torture in his role as naval attorney at Gitmo, he was among the smallest of wheels in a very large machine to do so.

Not a single American has been punished for what happened at Guantanamo, and the first should not be Ron DeSantis.

But DeSantis is not just anyone, he is one man out of hundreds of millions in the U.S. who says he wants to be president and has a decent chance of achieving just that. So instead of speculating on what DeSantis saw, let’s instead demand from him as a candidate a statement on torture itself. Knowing what he knows now, was torture the right thing post-9/11? As president, would he support torture in the future? As president, would he seek to close Guantanamo and set the thirty prisoners still there free? We know what Trump thinks about torture, know Biden as president has made no real efforts to close Gitmo or reduce its headcount. We know what a young naval officer named DeSantis did, more or less, when faced with torture by the United States of America in the name of justice for the Republic.

Later, at various points in his career DeSantis repeatedly argued that the United States was correct in imprisoning detainees outside the legal system, and after joining Congress in 2013, he became a leading voice to keep the prison open, even though few of the detainees there were ever charged and most have been released. He has described the hunger strikes as part of a jihad against the United States, and characterized claims of abuse from detainees and their lawyers as attempts to work the system. Asked about the hunger strikes, DeSantis said in an interview in 2018 that “what I learned from that… is they are using things like detainee abuse offensively against us. It was a tactic, technique, and procedure.”

DeSantis saw what he saw; with the passing of time does he still believe in what happened in Guantanamo? Vying to be Commander-in-Chief, “I was only following orders” will not be enough. In the name of never again, we need to know what would President DeSantis do.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

The Final Durham Report: Democracy’s Horror Show

May 26, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: 2020, 2024, Durham, FBI, Manafort, Mueller Report, Putin, Russiagate
Posted in: Biden, Democracy, Post-Constitution America, Trump

Hillary knew. She knew her campaign paid for Russian disinformation (including the alleged pee tape accusations) to be washed through a report by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. She knew the information was false but could potentially allow her to win the election. Hillary lied to the FBI about all this, and lied to the American public. Such was her appetite.

The FBI knew. They knew none of the information in the Steele Report could be corroborated, and they knew most of it was false. They turned a blind eye, purposefully and with the intent to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 election, to basic investigative and tradecraft rules to use the corrupt information to surveil the Trump campaign via the FISA court. When Trump won the election anyway, the FBI continued to use this information to assault the loyalty and viability of President Trump and ultimately tried to use the information via the Robert Mueller investigation to impeach or indict Trump.

Only one person went to jail for all this, a minor player named Kevin Clinesmith for provided false info to the FISA court. No changes are planned for the FBI. No charges are to be brought against Hillary Clinton. The Deep State came within an eyelash of bringing down an unwanted president as surely as they are believed to have done in Dallas ’63. Words were the weapon this time, not bullets.

These are the conclusions of the final Durham Report released last week.  The report was written by former Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was chosen in 2019 to examine the FBI probe known as “Operation Crossfire Hurricane.”  Durham provides the only comprehensive review of what came to be called Russiagate, and shows how close to the edge our democracy came to falling into the abyss at the hands of the Deep State. It all sounds dramatic, as those terms have been bandied about so often and in so many contexts they may have lost some of their meaning. But make no mistake about it — the FBI tried to shape the 2016 election and failing, tried to run Trump out of office. If you thought the “Hunter Biden Letter,” the one signed by dozens of intelligence professionals calling the Biden Diaries potential Russian disinformation was just wrong, you should find the conclusions of the Durham report a horror show.

There was nothing true in the Steele Report, for example, this key paragraph: “Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between them and the Russian leadership. This was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries. The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, whom President PUTIN apparently both hated and feared.”

The FBI had no intelligence about Trump or others associated with the Trump campaign being in contact with Russian intelligence beyond Steele. Despite being unvetted and uncorroborated and coming from a single source with direct political ties to Trump’s opponent, the FBI used such accusations to justify a full-spectrum surveillance operation against the Trump campaign, the first known such operation in American history. The FBI omitted the fact from its FISA application that Carter Page was in fact not a Russian agent but a paid source for the CIA who had been vetted by the Agency as loyal and reliable. They just lied and even when the lie could not be ignored the FBI lied more times to keep the surveillance application alive before the FISA court.

Durham found investigators “ignored exculpatory evidence, put too much stock in information provided by Trump’s political opponents, and carried out surveillance without genuinely believing there was probable cause to do so.” “Throughout the duration of Crossfire Hurricane, facts and circumstances that were inconsistent with the premise that Trump and/or persons associated with the Trump campaign were involved in a collusive or conspiratorial relationship with the Russian government were ignored or simply assessed away,” Durham wrote. The FBI acted “without appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power.”

It could not be more clear. The FBI knew what it was doing was wrong and did it anyway because the ends, defeating Trump, appeared to justify the means. No surprise, that has been the slogan behind every democratic election U.S. intelligence agencies have overthrown overseas, so why not follow the same logic when the tools of war came home to attempt to drive the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton.

We now know that almost all of the disinformation in the Steele Report came from one man, Igor Danchenko (whom the FBI had until 2011 investigated as a Russian spy.) Danchenko also fed disinfo to a Clinton supporter and registered foreign agent for Russia, Charles Dolan (who was known to but never interviewed by the FBI) to pass on the Steele to further obscure its origin. But according to the Durham report “The failure to identify the primary sub-source [Danchenko] early in the investigation’s pursuit of FISA authority prevented the FBI from properly examining the possibility that some or much of the non-open source information contained in Steele’s reporting was Russian disinformation (that wittingly or unwittingly was passed along to Steele), or that the reporting was otherwise not credible.”

Everyone knew. The Durham Report confirms on August 3, 2016, the Russiagate allegations were briefed to President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and FBI Director James Comey by CIA Director John Brennan at an Oval Office meeting. None of the men briefed, and none of the agencies involved, did anything to intercede in the FBI’s efforts alongside the Clinton Campaign to manufacture collusion between Trump and Russia. Indeed, everyone allowed the falsehoods to linger into the Mueller Report and when that document concluded publicly there was no collusion between Trump and the Kremlin, pivot the same pile of falsehoods to claim Trump somehow obstructed an investigation which actually exonerated him, concluding without indictment as it did.

As for the FBI, the Durham report brutally tells us “the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law.” That they “displayed, at best, a cavalier attitude towards accuracy and completeness.” That the Bureau “disregarded significant exculpatory information that should have prompted investigative restraint and re-examination… there were clear opportunities to have avoided the mistakes and to have prevented the damage resulting from their embrace of seriously flawed information that they failed to analyze and assess properly.” And that “senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities.” That “important aspects of the Crossfire Hurricane matter were seriously deficient.” The Report concludes “although recognizing that in hindsight much is clearer, much of this also seems to have been clear at the time.” As for recommendations, the Report states “more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of “Protect[ing]the American People and Uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.”

Without the help of the FBI Russiagate would have been nothing but a flimsy Clinton campaign scam. Thus the Durham Report offers one over-arching implied conclusion: Be skeptical of the FBI and watch accusations of collusion and foreign interference closely around the 2024 election. Treason is indeed a twisty path.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

A Spectator Looks at the Durham Report

May 21, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: Collusion, Danchenko, Durham, FBI, Lisa Page, Mueller, Peter Strzok, Russiagate
Posted in: Democracy, Trump

This week’s Durham Report is as close as we’ll get in our lifetimes to proof the Deep State, working in concert with the mainstream media, exists.

The final 306 page Durham Report was released this week. The report was written by former U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was chosen in the aftermath of the Mueller Report to examine the FBI probe known as “Operation Crossfire Hurricane.” Durham in this final report provides the only comprehensive review of what came to be called in total “Russiagate,” and shows how close our democracy came to failing at the hands of the Deep State. We now know the FBI took disinformation produced by the Russians and used that to justify spying on the Trump campaign. Though Durham does not go into the MSM side of Russiagate, we also now see more clearly how the media played along to press a fully-false narrative of collusion right to the precipice of impeachment or indictment.

The short summary of Durham: willingly or via incredible sloppiness, the FBI participated in an information operation designed first to keep Donald Trump out of the White House and failing that, drive him from office. The op was funded by the Clinton campaign, who paid former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to create a “dossier,” a report based on Russian disinformation funneled to him by Igor Danchenko (whom the FBI had until 2011 investigated as a Russian spy.) Without vetting or investigating the (dis)information, the FBI used it alongside a tip from a shady Australian diplomat to open full-spectrum surveillance of Donald Trump and his associates, lying to the FISA court along the way. This was the first known time such a thing was undertaken in American political history. The goal was to show collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. When that failed, the FBI pivoted into providing the bulk of data behind the Mueller Report. That Report was designed to take down, via impeachment or indictment, a sitting president and if that too failed, disempower him for much of his term. If you want to call it a soft coup attempt you would not be far off.

As for the FBI, the Durham report unsparingly tells us “the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law.” That they “displayed, at best, a cavalier attitude towards accuracy and completeness.” That the Bureau “disregarded significant exculpatory information that should have prompted investigative restraint and re-examination… there were clear opportunities to have avoided the mistakes and to have prevented the damage resulting from their embrace of seriously flawed information that they failed to analyze and assess properly.” As for recommendations so that such a thing never happens again, the Durham Report weakly offers none and states “more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of “Protect[ing]the American People and Uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.” There was a bias at the heart of Crossfire Hurricane that kept agents from carefully examining evidence.

Durham generously does not state the FBI acted incompetently on purpose (it is chilling however to remember FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged texts saying “Page: ‘Trump’s not ever going to become president, right?’ Strzok: ‘No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.’”), allowing some space for beginner’s mistakes such as not vetting Christopher Steele’s sources and methods. Was it active or tacit support by the FBI? Durham does not say. It all does suggest why Robert Mueller walked so close to the edge of indictment and backed off. If his indictments did not hold up under court scrutiny, the people in charge of all this would have been exposed. Mueller was protecting his beloved FBI from the criticism Durham just laid bare. There was a bias at the heart of Mueller’s work that kept agents from carefully examining evidence.

Christopher Steele meanwhile was worth his weight in gold to Clinton: he got the FBI to launch a full-spectrum investigation that included eavesdropping, use of a honey pot dangle, and foreign agents, all of which lead to three years of Mueller and right to the door of impeachment.

Steele’s second prong was the media. Steele set himself up as a source to compliant media about the dossier without revealing to them he was the author of the document. This information loop made it appear a second entity was confirming the contents of the dossier, when in fact it was Steele surreptitiously confirming himself. It’s an old spy trick, getting inside, becoming your own corroborating source. In intelligence work, for the receiver of information, this is known as cross-contamination, an amateur error the FBI seemed OK with. The scam also generated cover for all the politicians and intelligence operatives. They could go to their bosses and say the New York Times found a source confirming what they were hearing from Steele. There was a bias at the heart of the MSM which kept journalists from carefully examining evidence.

And in the end… not much. Only one person was ever convicted of anything (a future Jeopardy! clue, “who was Clinesmith for lying to the FISA court”) and no one in the media was driven into early retirement; on the contrary, Pulitzers were awarded for reporting Russian disinformation laundered through Steele and the FBI. Hillary Clinton came within a sharp breath of beating Trump, and the information op would have played a large part in that. But the lessons learned are not for them. This time they are for us, or rather for us in 2024. We must be more skeptical of any claims of foreign collusion, more watchful of the FBI, and tougher critics of the media. We need to reject salacious gossip (ex. the pee tape) pretending to be news. We will need to spend less time debating the existence of the Deep State and more time reigning it in.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

What Do You Do With the Past?

May 18, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: amends, bully, bullying, reparations
Posted in: Other Ideas

That’s me in back row of the photo of the old junior high school football team, with the dorky glasses. In an age of apologies and reparations it begs an answer: what do you do about the past?

It starts easy. The adult close to me is Mr. Hammer, the wood shop teacher. Yes, Mr. Hammer. His giggly name somehow still remains amusing to me, some 50 years later. He was a good teacher and coach, fair, even tempered, thought all the stuff we were doing mattered but not too much. I just learned from Google he was a Korean War vet (he never mentioned it) and passed away a few years ago after 24 years of teaching. I have no idea who the other coach is.

My obsession isn’t with the names anyway, it is with what happened to these people and our past. We have not kept in touch, and the last time I spoke with any of them would have been in 1978 when most of us graduated from high school. How many “did well” with life? How many are dead, or in jail, or homeless, or alcoholic? Any of them do something good for the world, maybe as a doctor or teacher? Do any of them ever wonder what happened to me?

Two boys in the front row were star players. They literally had star decals on their helmets so everyone knew, this being in an age before participation trophies. Google says one of them still lives in town but offers no clues as to what happened to him along the way, nothing on the other one. There’s another boy in the photo near the back I learned from Facebook is gay. I didn’t know him well in junior high school, but I wonder now how many of the other boys were gay. No one “came out” back then. We as a team would today be considered completely homophobic based on the language we used. Anyone who made a bad play or fumbled the ball or was even late to the huddle was a f*ggot. If you’re anywhere nearby our age group you also said that word. Everybody did.

But despite the language I am not sure we were homophobic, as we had as little idea what being gay was all about as we had then about heterosexual stuff, absent self-entertainment which likely worked the same way for everyone. This is probably the biggest change the internet brought to society. Kids stop being naive at age two now. I’m as certain the gay kid was hurt by what we all said as I am certain that he said those same words along with us. In 7th grade anything that made you stand out made you someone’s target.

After junior high, trying out for football at my high school meant being bullied by the varsity. If you were lucky they only stole your lunch and made you embarrass yourself singing to the group. Sometimes they took away our water on hot days (water during practice was rationed in this era, to toughen us up.) For others, it was caustic muscle creams smeared in your jock before practice. It went on after the coaches would mysteriously disappear during certain breaks. Adult teachers with clear responsibility to stop it, but who did nothing but encourage it, calling it initiation. I have no idea, some 50 years later, why I voluntarily participated in all this. I believe I was temporarily insane.

Very few guys quit the team, most just endured, some sought empty relief bullying others. I was in that last group, mercilessly teasing a poor kid weaker than me. I was cruel in a way I wish I hated then the way I hate it now. He was an easy target who I thought years ago was a way for me to feel better. I couldn’t beat up the varsity football team who humiliated me, so that kid was their surrogate. Nothing I have done before or after makes me more ashamed.

He’s in that picture, the kid who became the target of my bullying. It’s easier to write this if he has a name, so Ron, though of course that is not his real name which I do remember and cannot forget. We got along OK in junior high, friendly if not friends. But the high school football we went on to was struggle, not fun. The upperclassmen players bullied the younger kids like me endlessly, brutally at times.

I have not been again on that playing field in more than four decades yet I can point now to the exact spot on Google Maps where it all happened. The worst initiation the older kids had was making us fight each other. This usually took the form of whacking each other with tackling dummies, heavy canvas bags. If the big kids did not think we were fighting enthusiastically enough they would step in and continue the assault themselves. It was worse when the bags were wet.

One pointlessly humid Ohio day I was told to stand up and choose my opponent. Usually you picked a buddy with the unspoken understanding the two of you would take it easy on each other. I chose instead to fight Ron. Ron had stopped growing sooner than most of us, Ron had a good heart but wasn’t much of a fighter, Ron thought I was enough of his friend to take it easy. But I did not. Something broke inside me like a summer thunderstorm. When Ron went down I kept hitting him, right in the face with the bag, with the blood from his nose splattering to the point where even the upper class animals running the initiation stopped me. I was never made to fight again. Ron quit the team.

I didn’t stop. I said, with great encouragement from teammates, terrible things to Ron everyday at lunch. I made his life dark. He must have felt his stomach twist in horrible anticipation every day heading into the cafeteria. He tried to make peace with me despite I am sure not having a clue as to why I had become his predator but I refused to back down. The semester ended in exhaustion and I never played a team sport or trusted an authority figure again, my apolitical red pill moment. Ron sat somewhere else for lunch after Christmas break. I’ve had no contact with him since until I found him in that photo last night.

Google found him, too, I think. It looks like he’s a lawyer, made partner in his firm. He’s married. Seems to like to fish. The firm’s website lists a phone number that even now stares at me.

What do you do with the past? Do I call him, apologize, offer some sort of reparation, donate money to some anti-bullying group? Would he want that, would he accept that? Does he remember me, or was I just another forgettable part of high school that got discarded when he went on to his good college and his good law school? Does he live with what he can’t get past? Facebook says he has sons.

He must remember me, the efforts I made to hurt him had to have left some mark. What would he say to an apology? Would he, falsely but graciously accept whatever I said and get off the phone to tell his wife “Honey, you’ll never guess the odd call I had today…” over dinner? Would he listen to me a moment and then uncork decades of anger and resentment, telling me how I hurt him not only that day but forever, that these things don’t go away? Am I one of his ghosts as he is one of mine?

I talked to a psychiatrist friend, who explained the concept of amends used by Alcoholics Anonymous. Making amends is one of the last steps toward recovery, and is premised as “we may stop causing any more harm but that is not the same as repairing the damage we have already caused. We feel a man is unthinking when he says sobriety is enough.” I may have become a better man than I was on that damn football team, but I have done nothing to repair the damage I did.

You start amends by asking permission of the person you harmed. You acknowledge this is to help yourself, that you alone bear responsibility. My excuse – I bullied because I was bullied – is too easy for this task. Some things are always wrong and I should have known that, whether my society or my coaches said it was OK. It is as weak as my tormentors claiming the initiations were all part of toughening us up for the football season, and about building comradery as they too had once been humiliated as freshmen.

Amends demands I not elicit sympathy or make any excuses. I should ask for forgiveness, but not say I am sorry, no remorseful mumbling. If Ron is unable to forgive me, it is my burden. Some debts like that take a long, long time to repay, maybe until forever. You can’t rewrite the past.

The point of amends is asking my victim to help me. It is not about disguising my guilt as an apology. That is what separates amends from something like reparations, where it is the victim who benefits, often monetarily. There may be a place for that, but that place is not part of this old picture and the question about what do you do with the past that it screams at me.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Jack Teixeira and Security Clearances

May 6, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: background investigation, Chelsea Manning, Classified, Ed Snowden, Jack Teizeira, polygraph, security clearance, SF-86
Posted in: Military, NSA, Other Ideas

Air National Guard leaker Jack Teixeira had one of the highest levels of security clearance. Over five million Americans, more than the population of Costa Rica, Ireland or New Zealand, hold some type of security clearance. Can we trust them? Is Teixeira an exception, or is the process never expected to work 100 percent of the time?

A security clearance is issued by a part of the U.S. Government (Department of Defense, CIA, the State Department…) and says the holder can be trusted to handle sensitive documents and duties. At the low end this may mean a contractor can enter the Navy Yard without a body search, or at the extreme means a person will assume a completely new identity, live abroad, and conduct clandestine actions on behalf of the U.S.

Government-wide there are three basic levels of clearance: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. There are formal definitions, but the basic idea is that the higher you go up the ladder, the more harm and damage disclosure would create. Added to this three-tiered system are many subcategories, including Sensitive But Unclassified, for well, unclassified things that are still sensitive, such as an applicant’s social security number, Law Enforcement Sensitive and the like. Top Secret is supplemented by Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), often used to denote information obtained from intelligence sources. There are also many, many flavors of Special Access Programs (SAP) that require both a very high level clearance and specific permission to access just that single project, such as a clandestine operation against Iran, or the identities of spies in Syria. The military has its own lexicon of classifications.

The clearance process is largely a variation on a single note: let’s look into what this person has done in his life prior to seeking a clearance, and then try to extrapolate that into what he will do once cleared. But because, like your mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future success, the process is inherently flawed.

Despite the wide variety of clearances available, the process of obtaining one is similar across the board. What changes is less the process of looking into someone’s life than the granularity of the look. Most everyone seeking a clearance begins at the same place, filling out Standard Form 86, Questionnaire for National Security Positions, form SF-86. The SF-86 is mainly a very detailed autobiography, the raw material that fuels the rest of the process. Young people filling out their first SF-86 invariably end up on the phone to mom, gathering old addresses they lived at as kids, birthdays of disconnected relatives, foreign countries visited on family trips and more, a lot more: the SF-86 runs some 129 pages. Some interesting perjury bait is near the end, almost silly questions such as “Have you ever engaged in an act of terrorism?” and a follow-up requiring you to describe, in one line, “The nature and reason for the terror activity.”

After a hundred pages of names and dates the SF-86 dips into the deal breakers, the questions that weed out quickly those who are unlikely to get very far in the clearance process. Applicants are asked to self-describe financial problems, debts, drug use, gambling, drinking, mental health issues, legal troubles, job firings, and more. Whether out of duty and honor, or more likely a thought process that the agency will find out anyway and lying is an automatic disqualification, most applicants do tell the truth and disqualify themselves.

Everyone who gets past the SF-86 has some standard checks run on them. Since U.S. Citizenship is the most basic and unwavering requirement for a clearance, every applicant’s claim to being an American is verified. Every applicant then gets a run through whatever databases and electronic records can be found. The goal is to verify quickly as much of the self-provided data and to skim off the low-hanging fruit. A serious arrest record, neck-deep financial problems, and the like will be easily found. Checks are also run through the various intelligence files (a National Agency Check) to make sure while you’re applying for a job at the State Department you are not on some secret list of bad guys over at CIA. For some low-level or short-term clearances, the process can stop here and a decision is made. The time period varies, but usually is a couple of months for a background-only clearance.

For higher level clearances, including Top Secret, a full spectrum investigation is required. An investigator will visit an applicant’s home town school teachers, his second-to-last-boss, his neighbors, his parents, and almost certainly the local police force and ask questions in person. As part of the clearance process, an applicant will sign the Mother of All Waivers, basically giving the government permission to do all this as intrusively as the government cares to do. This is old fashioned shoe leather police work, knocking on doors, eye balling people who say they knew the applicant, turning the skepticism meter up to 11. The investigator will ask each interviewee to keep quiet about the interview, but typically the applicant will get a hushed phone call or email from some old acquaintance saying the Feds just knocked. Many of the contract investigators at this level are retired FBI or Secret Service people and often will present their old ID to add some gravitas to the procedure. If an applicant lived abroad, the process is tasked out to the nearest U.S. Embassy. All this on-the-street work does not come cheap. A full background investigation can run $15-20,000.

For many agencies, including the CIA and NSA and likely for a guy like Teixeira, an additional step in the clearance process is the polygraph, the lie detector, the box. The federal government polygraphs about 70,000 people a year in connection with security clearances. What portion of the polygraph process that isn’t shrouded in movie drama is classified, but the basics are simple; even Mythbusters looked into it. The process is based on the belief that when one fibs one’s body involuntarily expresses stress in the form of higher blood pressure, changes in pulse, breathing, and perspiration rate. Those things can be precisely monitored. Did you ever steal anything? No? That’s a lie — see here, your heart rate went up X percent when you answered.

Some say that the presence of the polygraph machine itself may be mostly for show, and the real nuts and bolts of the process are actually just clever manipulation and interrogation techniques as old as dirt. An awful lot of information obtained via a polygraph has nothing to do with the needles and dials per se, but the applicant’s fear of them and belief that they “work.” Polygraphers are allowed considerable freedom in style, and some get more into role-playing than others. Often the applicant will self-incriminate.

Up to this point the clearance process has been mostly the aggregation of information. Along the way some applicants might be picked off, but most applicants for a clearance end up in adjudication. And in adjudication lies the core problem in the clearance process: it relies on human judgment.

The basics of an adjudication look at vulnerabilities, and at past examples of trusts kept or violated.

Vulnerabilities are easier to determine. People betray their country’s trust for money, sex/compromise, ego or ideology. People with loads of debt or a gambling problem are more susceptible to bribes. People with records of infidelity or a pattern of poor judgment might be lured into sexual encounters that could be used to compromise them. In the bad old days when most LGBT applicants were deeply closeted, this was used as a one-size-fits-all pseudo-reason to deny them employment. Ego is a tougher one to pin down, but persons who lack self-esteem or who want to play at being a “real spy” might be tempted to become “heroes” for the other side. Ideology is a growing issue as more and more hyphenated Americans seek government work and, needing qualified language employees, more and more are recruited by the government. Will a Chinese-American’s loyalty fall to her new home or to the old country where grandma still resides?

Back in the good old days, when qualification for high level positions required one to be male, pale and Yale, these things were less of concern. Fathers recruited sons, professors noted promising students, and no one thought much about the messy range of people now sought for government work. Need fluent Farsi speakers or a surge of network engineers? You’re going to have to recruit farther afield than the country club. Agencies who used to toss back into the pond pretty much anyone without a pristine background now face unfilled critical positions. So, standards change, always have changed, and will continue to change. Security clearances just work that way.

If vulnerabilities seem sometimes ambiguous to adjudicate, the next category, trust, is actually much harder. Persons who have kept trusts extended to them, not been fired, not broken laws, paid their bills, saw to their responsibilities, are in the Nice category. Those who didn’t end up over in Naughty. The adjudication part becomes important because very few people are perfect, and very few are really bad. Most everyone falls in the middle, and so agencies must make judgment calls. The goal is to come up with a picture of the person, and then project that picture forward into what they might be like on the job. Like any human-powered process that attempts to predict the future, it is flawed. That’s how Jack Teixeira (Ed Snowden, Chelsea Manning, et al) ended up with a Top Secret security clearance.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Four Tips for My New Undergrad Classmates

May 5, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tags: advice, notes, resources, time, undergrad
Posted in: Other Ideas

I am now officially old, at least old enough to take advantage of a program at my local public university that allows me, an old person, to audit a class alongside undergrads gratis. In theory I’m supposed to add my life experiences to their learning, and they are to see in me the pleasure of learning for its own sake. I am supposed to benefit from being around their youthful vigor and all. We’ll see about all that. But I do now have a plausible explanation for the police as to why I am shirtless at a foam party alongside “adults” more than four decades my junior — I need to give back. Cross-generational communication being what it is I am treading lightly on passing out life advice (“Foam is really slippery and you lose flexibility as you age”) and felt it better to write down what I wish I could say to them between classes.

1. Go to class. Whether or not your professor takes attendance, go to class. You got out of the habit during your Zoom School days, I know. But professors have the habit of saying interesting and useful things in class, so go listen to them. If you’re concerned about grades, listening to what a professor choses to emphasize out of the reading (and do the reading) will be a big hint as to what will be emphasized on the test. Especially go to the first class and write down everything the professor says. Much of it won’t make sense, because it is about a subject you have not yet studied but months from now when you’re staring down the barrel of a final exam those ideas important enough to mention on day one will likely be a part of it. Sit up front, show some interest, ask an intelligent question or two (never “Is this gonna be on the test?” or “why do we have to study this stuff?”) and you may even develop an intellectual bond with the instructor.

2. Leave the computer in your dorm. Sitting in the back of the classroom, I look out on to a sea of Insta and other social media, Amazon pages, and the like, with sometimes (for the good students) half the small screen devoted to a Word document for notes. It is unfair to place a catalog screen designed by award-winning psychologists to attract you in competition with a Teaching Assistant in front of a class for the first time since 6th grade book reports. Unless you need to actually compute things, leave the devices back in the dorm. Take notes by hand, on paper. You’ll retain more and stay connected with the material better.

3. Learn to take notes. This is a life skill, not a college skill, so best to learn it. Notes help you remember what was said, to reconstruct the argument the professor made, to mark down what was important, to compare what showed up both in the reading and in class (it’s going to matter if it is in both places) and to help you pay attention if yes, it sometimes gets boring. Ideally your notes should resemble a term paper (and yes you can learn to write better term papers by learning to take better notes) with some sort of topic sentence followed by examples followed by a conclusion. Most times the professor will help you with this, laying out an outline of sorts on slides or on the board. Unless you’ve got a good reason not to, your notes should at the end of class look a  lot like what the prof wrote — I. Causes of WWII followed by a, b, and c, listing causes such as c) Japan’s need for resources, esp. oil and rubber, followed by the conclusions the war was caused by runaway capitalism or whatever. If your notes are incomplete — “something about Germany” — you need more details. If you are always racing to keep up you may need less detail on paper and to spend more time just listening; you’re not a stenographer. Notes are not transcripts of the lecture, they are something akin to an x-ray view of the lecture. If all else fails, make an appointment to see the prof, explain your note taking problem, and ask (very politely, profs can be possessive) to see his lecture notes if possible. Compare yours to his and adjust accordingly.

4. Learn to manage time. This is also life skill, not a college skill, so best to learn it. Most high school teachers managed your time for you. They broke things down into class-size packages, lightened up a bit for Homecoming Weekend, and incessantly counted down for you to the next test. If you had to write a paper, many times they’d break that process down, demanding a reading list one Monday, an outline the next week, a rough draft by week four, etc. Rarely so in college. The syllabus issued on day one might mention a 10 page paper is due at week 14 and leave it at that. Same for reading; that fat stack of books in front of you has to be read between August and Christmas break, so you have plenty of time. You actually do not. Learn to work backwards from deadlines to day one of class, maybe even make a little calendar for yourself so you know by week three you should have some idea of a reading list for your paper, etc. This is your guide, so if by week four you do not have an outline that should answer your question about whether you can afford to stay up all night for Homecoming raves or not. Think of it partly as a bank. If you have enough hours in and are on schedule you can afford to spend a little more time away. But if you are in to deficit spending on time… think “clean as you go.” Anybody who has worked at a restaurant knows you can’t go home at night until everything is cleaned for the next day. If you clean as you go throughout the night, it is easier than starting at 2 am. It is even better to not make a mess in the first place.

Everything else: Don’t talk to the police without a lawyer present. Don’t cheat. Think before you speak. Sometimes don’t speak. Be generous if you have resources your classmates do not have. Drugs are not for stupid people. And the guy who usually sits in seat 13E, I think you’re wasting your time. And I saw the girl in front of you waiting after class for someone else, sorry, man. Maybe see you two at the foam party?

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